UCSC Genome Browser enters 20th year.

The University of California Santa Cruz Genome Browser website (https://genome.ucsc.edu) enters its 20th year of providing high-quality genomics data visualization and genome annotations to the research community. In the past year, we have added a new option to our web BLAT tool that allows search against all genomes, a single-cell expression viewer (https://cells.ucsc.edu), a 'lollipop' plot display mode for high-density variation data, a RESTful API for data extraction and a custom-track backup feature. New datasets include Tabula Muris single-cell expression data, GeneHancer regulatory annotations, The Cancer Genome Atlas Pan-Cancer variants, Genome Reference Consortium Patch sequences, new ENCODE transcription factor binding site peaks and clusters, the Database of Genomic Variants Gold Standard Variants, Genomenon Mastermind variants and three new multi-species alignment tracks.

Use of ENCODE resources to characterize novel proteoforms and missing proteins in the human proteome.

We describe the utility of integrated strategies that employ both translation of ENCODE data and major proteomic technology pillars to improve the identification of the "missing proteins", novel proteoforms, and PTMs. On one hand, databases in combination with bioinformatic tools are efficiently utilized to establish microarray-based transcript analysis and supply rapid protein identifications in clinical samples. On the other hand, sequence libraries are the foundation of targeted protein identification and quantification using mass spectrometric and immunoaffinity techniques. The results from combining proteoENCODEdb searches with experimental mass spectral data indicate that some alternative splicing forms detected at the transcript level are in fact translated to proteins. Our results provide a step toward the directives of the C-HPP initiative and related biomedical research.

ENCODE whole-genome data in the UCSC Genome Browser.

The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project is an international consortium of investigators funded to analyze the human genome with the goal of producing a comprehensive catalog of functional elements. The ENCODE Data Coordination Center at The University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) is the primary repository for experimental results generated by ENCODE investigators. These results are captured in the UCSC Genome Bioinformatics database and download server for visualization and data mining via the UCSC Genome Browser and companion tools (Rhead et al. The UCSC Genome Browser Database: update 2010, in this issue). The ENCODE web portal at UCSC (http://encodeproject.org or http://genome.ucsc.edu/ENCODE) provides information about the ENCODE data and convenient links for access.