The impact of next generation sequencing on genomics is beginning to be felt and a major focus for Ensembl is adapting to changes in data type and scale that will result. As discussed last year (14) the scale of data is a major challenge for many bioinformatics resources. For the variation team the immediate challenge is to present the variation landscape that will be uncovered by the 1000 Genomes Project, which is now running. The gene build team is starting to develop pipelines that use next generation sequencing transcriptome data. We can envisage such data being collected systematically for many different cell types and developmental stages, providing increasingly complete evidence for alternative splicing variants and functional annotation of the time and localization of their expression.
