The genome sequence of an organism provides a natural index for organizing and understanding biological data. The Ensembl project provides a comprehensive genome information system consisting of data storage, integration, analysis and visualization of a wide variety of biological data. Ensembl's primary focus is around providing gene annotation and comparative genome integration for chordate genomes, the vast majority of which are vertebrates. Ensembl concentrates particularly on mammalian genomes having developed initially around the human genome sequence. In comparison to similar projects based at the University of California Santa Cruz (1) and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (2), some of the distinguishing characteristics of the Ensembl project are: It provides consistent sets of annotation data within and between genomes: – It provides a geneset for each genome, generated from an automatic pipeline where no manually curated geneset exists, with stable identifiers which are tracked between Ensembl releases.–It provides relationships between genes and genomes in a comparative genomics framework in the form of sequence alignments, ortholog and paralog assignments and genetrees, again generated from an automatic pipeline where no manually curated
