UCSC released a new Conservation (13) annotation track on the March 2006 (Build 36, hg18) human genome in June 2007. This track displays multiz (14) multiple alignments of 27 vertebrate species to the human genome, along with measurements of evolutionary conservation across all 28 species and a separate measurement of conservation across the placental mammal subset of species (18 organisms). Included in the track are 5 new high-quality assemblies—horse, platypus, lizard, stickleback and medaka; 6 new low-coverage mammalian genomes—bushbaby, tree shrew, guinea pig, hedgehog, common shrew and cat; 6 updated assemblies—chimp, cow, chicken, frog, fugu and zebrafish; and 10 assemblies included in the previous version of the Conservation track—rhesus, mouse, rat, rabbit, dog, armadillo, elephant, tenrec, opossum and tetraodon. In addition to the expanded species list, the new Conservation track has been enhanced to include additional filtering of pairwise alignments for each species to reduce paralogous alignments and information about the quality of aligning species sequence included in the multiple alignments downloads. A similar Conservation annotation of at least 30 species is scheduled for release on the July 2007 (Build 37, mm9) mouse assembly in the last quarter of 2007.
