Welcome to the UCSC Genome Browser website. This site contains the reference sequence and working draft assemblies for a large collection of genomes. It also provides portals to the ENCODE and Neandertal projects.

WARNING: This is a test site. Data and tools here are under construction, have not been quality reviewed, and are subject to change at any time. For high-quality reviewed annotations on our production server, visit http://genome.ucsc.edu.

WARNING: This is our preview site. This website is a weekly mirror of our internal development server for public access. Data and tools here are under construction, have not been quality reviewed, and are subject to change at any time. We provide this site for early access, with the warning that it is less available and stable than our public site. For high-quality reviewed annotations on our production server, visit http://genome.ucsc.edu.

We encourage you to explore these sequences with our tools. The Genome Browser zooms and scrolls over chromosomes, showing the work of annotators worldwide. The Gene Sorter shows expression, homology and other information on groups of genes that can be related in many ways. Blat quickly maps your sequence to the genome. The Table Browser provides convenient access to the underlying database. VisiGene lets you browse through a large collection of in situ mouse and frog images to examine expression patterns. Genome Graphs allows you to upload and display genome-wide data sets.

The UCSC Genome Browser is developed and maintained by the Genome Bioinformatics Group, a cross-departmental team within the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering (CBSE) at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC). If you have feedback or questions concerning the tools or data on this website, feel free to contact us on our public mailing list.

To receive announcements of new genome assembly releases, new software features, updates and training seminars by email, subscribe to the genome-announce mailing list.

We have released a browser for the Medium ground finch, Geospiza fortis, reknowned as one of naturalist Charles Darwin's Galapagos finches. This species, which has been the subject of many evolutionary studies, is one of a group of birds that evolved over a few million years from a single ancestral species into multiple species whose beak sizes and shapes are specialized for using different food resources. The phenotypic diversity of these birds contributed to Darwin's theory of evolution. The significance of this genome assembly is described in the August 16, 2012, press release issued by the UCSC Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering (CBSE).

The initial Medium ground finch genome assembly (GeoFor_1.0, UCSC version geoFor1) is the product of a collaboration between the Genome 10K project and Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) to sequence 100 vertebrate species, and is the first to be released in the UCSC Genome Browser. For more information about the G. fortis genome, see the NCBI website.

Bulk downloads of the sequence and annotation data are available via the Genome Browser FTP server or the Downloads page. The browser annotation tracks were generated by UCSC and collaborators worldwide. See the Credits page for a detailed list of the organizations and individuals who contributed to this release. We'd like to thank BGI for contributing the data for this assembly and acknowledge the UCSC staff members who released this browser: Hiram Clawson and Greg Roe.

We are pleased to announce a few changes to the look and feel of the Genome Browser website. In addition to a new font throughout the site, the first thing you might notice is a new menu bar across the top of many of the pages. We have reorganized the navigation on our web applications with you in mind; we hope you find it more intuitive!

Additionally, we greatly simplified the search mechanism by collapsing all search methods into a single box.

In this box, you can search for chromosomal coordinate ranges, gene names, accession numbers, keywords, etc. For a complete list of ways to query the browser data, see Querying the Genome Browser.

As always, if you have questions about the website or the data, please Contact Us.

16 July 2012 - Tasmanian Devil assembly now available in Genome Browser: We are pleased to announce the release of a Genome Browser for the February 2011 Tasmanian devil assembly, Sarcophilus harrisii (WTSI version Devil_refv7.0, UCSC version sarHar1). Read more.

06 July 2012 - Retirement of hgText CGI: We are announcing the imminent retirement of the hgText CGI. Read more.

==> News Archives

The sequence and annotation data displayed in the Genome Browser are freely available for any use with the following conditions:

• Genome sequence data use restrictions are noted within the species sections on the Credits page.
• Some annotation tracks contributed by external collaborators contain proprietary data that have specific use restrictions. To check for restrictions associated with a particular genome assembly, review the database/README.txt file in the assembly's downloads directory.

The UCSC, Ensembl, and NCBI browser and annotation groups have established a common set of minimum requirements for public display of genome data made available after Spring 2009, described here.

The Genome Browser and Blat software are free for academic, nonprofit, and personal use. A license is required for commercial use. See the Licenses page for more information.

Program-driven use of this software is limited to a maximum of one hit every 15 seconds and no more than 5,000 hits per day.

For assistance with questions or problems regarding the UCSC Genome Browser software, database, genome assemblies, or release cycles, see the FAQ.