This hands-on workshop is an introduction to the Ensembl project that provides a comprehensive and integrated source of annotation of mainly vertebrate genome sequences. Our sister project Ensembl Genomes can also be covered if participants are working with bacteria, plants, fungi, protists or (invertebrate) metazoa.

We will cover:

* Introduction to Ensembl: origin, goals and organisation of the project

* Genebuild: how are Ensembl gene and transcripts predictions made?

* Variation: SNPs and other polymorphisms, haplotypes, linkage disequilibrium, structural variants like CNVs, the Variant Effect Predictor (VEP) tool

* Data export with BioMart: retrieving datasets using a web interface

Depending on the interests participants express when they register, we will also cover:

* Comparative genomics and proteomics: orthologues, protein families, whole genome alignments and syntenic regions

* Regulation: Sequences that may be involved in gene regulation, and integration of ENCODE data

* Custom data upload

Further information and details on how to register, can be found here.