About Ensembl

Information About Ensembl

The Ensembl Project

Ensembl is a joint project between EMBL - European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (WTSI) to develop a software system which produces and maintains automatic annotation on selected eukaryotic genomes. Ensembl is primarily funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Goals of Ensembl

The Ensembl project aims to provide:

Accurate, automatic analysis of genome data.
Analysis and annotation maintained on the current data.
Presentation of the analysis to all via the web.
Distribution of the analysis to other bioinformatics laboratories.

Ensembl will concentrate on vertebrate genomes, but other groups have adapted the system for use with plant and fungal genomes. Please see Powered by Ensembl for a list of projects that use Ensembl technology.

Commitments of Ensembl

The commitments of the Ensembl project are:

Release of data and analysis into the public domain immediately.
Open, collaborative software development: Ensembl imposes no restrictions on access to, or use of, the data provided and the software used to analyse and present it. For more details see the code licence and disclaimer.
Collaboration on agreed standards for distribution.
Timely development.

Citing Ensembl

As Ensembl is continuously producing new website and data releases, please mention the version and release date when citing Ensembl (currently v40 - Aug2006).

For a general reference to the Ensembl system, please cite the most recent overview article, currently:

E. Birney, D. Andrews, M. Caccamo, Y. Chen, L. Clarke, G. Coates, T. Cox, F. Cunningham, V. Curwen, T. Cutts, T. Down, R. Durbin, X. M. Fernandez-Suarez, P. Flicek, S. Gräf, M. Hammond, J. Herrero, K. Howe, V. Iyer, K. Jekosch, A. Kähäri, A. Kasprzyk, D. Keefe, F. Kokocinski, E. Kulesha, D. London, I. Longden, C. Melsopp, P. Meidl, B. Overduin, A. Parker, G. Proctor, A. Prlic, M. Rae, D. Rios, S. Redmond, M. Schuster, I. Sealy, S. Searle, J. Severin, G. Slater, D. Smedley, J. Smith, A. Stabenau, J. Stalker, S. Trevanion, A. Ureta-Vidal, J. Vogel, S. White, C. Woodwark, and T. J. P. Hubbard
Ensembl 2006
Nucleic Acids Res. 2006 Jan 1;34 Database issue:D556-D561.
doi:10.1093/nar/gkj133
[Abstract] [Full text]

A comprehensive list of overview and more specialised articles would be available from the Ensembl scientific publications page.

Archive! Sites

From November 2004, Ensembl has kept a series of archive sites for every Ensembl version from 26 onwards. For more information see http://archive.ensembl.org/.

Ashbya Genome Database .