The UCSC Genome Browser database: 2023 update.

The UCSC Genome Browser (https://genome.ucsc.edu) is an omics data consolidator, graphical viewer, and general bioinformatics resource that continues to serve the community as it enters its 23rd year. This year has seen an emphasis in clinical data, with new tracks and an expanded Recommended Track Sets feature on hg38 as well as the addition of a single cell track group. SARS-CoV-2 continues to remain a focus, with regular annotation updates to the browser and continued curation of our phylogenetic sequence placing tool, hgPhyloPlace, whose tree has now reached over 12M sequences. Our GenArk resource has also grown, offering over 2500 hubs and a system for users to request any absent assemblies. We have expanded our bigBarChart display type and created new ways to visualize data via bigRmsk and dynseq display. Displaying custom annotations is now easier due to our chromAlias system which eliminates the requirement for renaming sequence names to the UCSC standard. Users involved in data generation may also be interested in our new tools and trackDb settings which facilitate the creation and display of their custom annotations.

The UCSC Genome Browser database: 2022 update.

The UCSC Genome Browser, https://genome.ucsc.edu, is a graphical viewer for exploring genome annotations. The website provides integrated tools for visualizing, comparing, analyzing, and sharing both publicly available and user-generated genomic datasets. Data highlights this year include a collection of easily accessible public hub assemblies on new organisms, now featuring BLAT alignment and PCR capabilities, and new and updated clinical tracks (gnomAD, DECIPHER, CADD, REVEL). We introduced a new Track Sets feature and enhanced variant displays to aid in the interpretation of clinical data. We also added a tool to rapidly place new SARS-CoV-2 genomes in a global phylogenetic tree enabling researchers to view the context of emerging mutations in our SARS-CoV-2 Genome Browser. Other new software focuses on usability features, including more informative mouseover displays and new fonts.

Variant interpretation: UCSC Genome Browser Recommended Track Sets.

The UCSC Genome Browser has been an important tool for genomics and clinical genetics since the sequence of the human genome was first released in 2000. As it has grown in scope to display more types of data it has also grown more complicated. The data, which are dispersed at many locations worldwide, are collected into one view on the Browser, where the graphical interface presents the data in one location. This supports the expertise of the researcher to interpret variants in the genome. Because the analysis of single nucleotide variants and copy number variants require interpretation of data at very different genomic scales, different data resources are required. We present here several Recommended Track Sets designed to facilitate the interpretation of variants in the clinic, offering quick access to datasets relevant to the appropriate scale.

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.

The UCSC Genome Browser database: 2019 update.

The UCSC Genome Browser (https://genome.ucsc.edu) is a graphical viewer for exploring genome annotations. For almost two decades, the Browser has provided visualization tools for genetics and molecular biology and continues to add new data and features. This year, we added a new tool that lets users interactively arrange existing graphing tracks into new groups. Other software additions include new formats for chromosome interactions, a ChIP-Seq peak display for track hubs and improved support for HGVS. On the annotation side, we have added gnomAD, TCGA expression, RefSeq Functional elements, GTEx eQTLs, CRISPR Guides, SNPpedia and created a 30-way primate alignment on the human genome. Nine assemblies now have RefSeq-mapped gene models.

The UCSC Genome Browser database: 2017 update.

Since its 2001 debut, the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) Genome Browser (http://genome.ucsc.edu/) team has provided continuous support to the international genomics and biomedical communities through a web-based, open source platform designed for the fast, scalable display of sequence alignments and annotations landscaped against a vast collection of quality reference genome assemblies. The browser's publicly accessible databases are the backbone of a rich, integrated bioinformatics tool suite that includes a graphical interface for data queries and downloads, alignment programs, command-line utilities and more. This year's highlights include newly designed home and gateway pages; a new 'multi-region' track display configuration for exon-only, gene-only and custom regions visualization; new genome browsers for three species (brown kiwi, crab-eating macaque and Malayan flying lemur); eight updated genome assemblies; extended support for new data types such as CRAM, RNA-seq expression data and long-range chromatin interaction pairs; and the unveiling of a new supported mirror site in Japan.

GenArk: Towards a million UCSC Genome Browsers.

Interactive graphical genome browsers are essential tools for biologists working with DNA sequences. Although tens of thousands of new genome assemblies have become available over the last decade, accessibility is limited by the work involved in manually creating browsers and curating annotations. The results can push the limits of data storage infrastructure. To facilitate managing this increasing number of genome assemblies, we created the Genome Archive (GenArk) collection of UCSC Genome Browsers from assemblies hosted at NCBI(1). Built on our established assembly hub system, this collection enables fast, on-demand visualization of chromosome regions without requiring a database server. Available annotations include gene models, some mapped through whole-genome alignments, repeat masks, GC content, and others. We also modified our popular BLAT(2) aligner and in-silico PCR to support a large number of genomes using limited RAM. Users can upload additional annotations themselves via track hubs(3) and custom tracks. We can import more annotations in bulk from third-party resources, demonstrated here with TOGA(4) gene models. 2,430 GenArk assemblies are listed at https://hgdownload.soe.ucsc.edu/hubs/ and can be found by searching on the main UCSC gateway page. We will continue to add human high-quality assemblies and for other organisms, we are looking forward to receiving requests from the research community for ever more browsers and whole-genome alignments via http://genome.ucsc.edu/assemblyRequest.html.

GenArk: towards a million UCSC genome browsers.

Interactive graphical genome browsers are essential tools in genomics, but they do not contain all the recent genome assemblies. We create Genome Archive (GenArk) collection of UCSC Genome Browsers from NCBI assemblies. Built on our established track hub system, this enables fast visualization of annotations. Assemblies come with gene models, repeat masks, BLAT, and in silico PCR. Users can add annotations via track hubs and custom tracks. We can bulk-import third-party resources, demonstrated with TOGA and Ensembl gene models for hundreds of assemblies.Three thousand two hundred sixty-nine GenArk assemblies are listed at https://hgdownload.soe.ucsc.edu/hubs/ and can be searched for on the Genome Browser gateway page.