Tag: Human genome

Human genome annotation will be updated every 2 months

NCBI will be updating the human genome RefSeq annotation more frequently to incorporate improvements made to genes and transcripts by RefSeq curation experts. Faster updates will allow us to include the latest datasets.

In the past, we’ve produced a full re-annotation of the human genome about once a year. The last full annotation, Homo sapiens Annotation Release 109, was in March 2018. A full annotation is produced by two main processes:

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Human annotation release 109 for GRCh38.p12 is available in RefSeq

You can now download human annotation release 109 on FTP or explore it in the Genome Data Viewer, in the Gene database, and with BLAST.

Highlights in release 109:

A total of 20,203 protein-coding genes and 17,871 non-coding genes were annotated.
The number of annotated curated transcripts increased by 17% and genes with two or more curated alternative variants increased by 8%.
The annotation includes 6,862 features and 2,075 GeneIDs for non-genic functional elements, such as regulatory regions and known structural elements. For example, see the opsin locus control region (OPSIN-LCR).

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5 NCBI articles in 2018 Nucleic Acids Research database issue

The 2018 Nucleic Acids Research database issue features several papers from NCBI staff that cover the status and future of databases including CCDS, ClinVar, GenBank and RefSeq. These papers are also available on PubMed. To read an article, click on the PMID number listed below.

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dbSNP architecture redesign supports future human variation data expansion; changes to be introduced over the next year

To continue providing efficient and timely processing, annotation, and dissemination of data, dbSNP’s architecture and process flow have been redesigned. The technical redesign prepares the database for increasing data volumes and providing timely, effective and trustworthy reference SNP results as submission rates continue to increase.

Highlights of the new system include:

Use of data objects instead of a relational database
Improved algorithms for clustering data into unique Reference SNPs
Automation of the entire process to provide timely releases
Guaranteed data consistency across dbSNP data accessed using web-based products or downloaded content, such as VCF and FTP files

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RefSeq Functional Elements now public

NCBI is pleased to announce the initial data release of RefSeq Functional Elements, a resource that provides RefSeq and Gene records for experimentally validated human and mouse non-genic functional elements. Data can be accessed via Gene, Nucleotide, BLAST, BioProject, Graphical Displays and FTP.

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Designing exon-specific primers for the human genome

A common task facing geneticists is to assay for sequence changes at particular locations in genes. These assays are often looking for changes in the coding exon of genes, and the target sequences are typically amplified using PCR from genomic DNA using a pair of specific primers. In this article, we will show you how to use NCBI Reference Sequences and Primer-BLAST, NCBI’s primer designer and specificity checker, to design a pair of primers that will amplify a single exon (exon 15) of the human breast cancer 1 (BRCA1) gene.

Here are the steps to follow to design primers to amplify exon 15 from human BRCA1:

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Sequence updates in human assembly GRCh38: improving gene annotation

In an earlier blog post, we discussed how sequence updates in GRCh38, the most recent version of the human reference genome, filled in a gap in human chromosome 17 near position 21,300K and expanded the region by 500K (500,000 base pairs). In this post, we will again consider this same region, but with an emphasis now on how GRCh38 also improved the gene annotation.

"Figure — **Figure 1**. Annotation of a region of chromosome 17 near the KCNJ12 and KCNJ18 genes. *Top panel*: Annotation release 105 on GRCh37.p13 represented by a configured graphic display of sequence record NC_000017.10. *Bottom panel*: Annotation release 106 on assembly GRCh38 represented by a configured graphic display of sequence record NC_000017.11. New gene models are circled.

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Sequence updates in human genome assembly GRCh38: filling in the gaps

In a previous blog post, we explained several important concepts about the human reference genome. We presented a region of human chromosome 17 as an example of a location where the genome sequence was not fully assembled. In this post, we are going to revisit the same gapped region to see how the Genome Reference Consortium (GRC) changed this part of the genome in GRCh38, the updated human reference assembly released in December 2013. This region represents just one of the more than 1,000 changes and improvements that the GRC introduced in GRCh38.

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NCBI’s Genome Remapping Service assists in the transition to the new human genome reference assembly (GRCh38)

In late December 2013, the Genome Reference Consortium (GRC) released an updated version of the human reference genome assembly, GRCh38, and submitted these new sequences to GenBank. This is the first time in four years that a new major version of the human genome has become available to the genomics community.

Perhaps you’ve been working on data mapped to the previous assembly (GRCh37) that became available in March 2009, or maybe you are still using an even earlier version, such as NCBI36 from March 2006. Is there a way to reduce the amount of time and effort required to reanalyze your data in the context of the new assembly?

Yes! It’s NCBI’s Genome Remapping Service, or NCBI Remap for short.

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Introducing the New Human Genome Assembly: GRCh38

This month marks a major event in the realm of human genome research: the release of a new assembly of the genome, GRCh38. It has been over four years since the last major release (GRCh37 in March 2009), and we are going to explore several aspects of this new assembly in a series of blog posts over the coming weeks. In this initial post, we will give an overview of the data flow so that you will understand how NCBI received the data, where the data are at NCBI and what genome annotations you can expect from NCBI in the near future.
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