The Ensembl Toolkit for Big Data Access - ASHG 2015

Date:

  Thursday 8 October 2015

Contact: 

Emily Perry

Registration closed

Course Overview

Modern biological research requires a varied toolkit, specialized for data scales from single gene to gene list to whole genome. Ensembl provides such a toolkit to access genetic and genomic data for >70 species. This workshop covers different methods for accessing big and small Ensembl data, featuring the following hands-on demonstrations:

  • Flexible data export using BioMart for gene lists (10min)
  • Command line querying using the Ensembl MySQL server (10min)
  • Scripting with Perl-API, the most flexible method (10min)
  • Accessing data via REST-API, including quick lookups, scripting in different languages, and high-throughput POST access. REST-API handles <1000 queries/second to extract genomic data via programmatic database access (20min)
  • Downloading complete genomic data from the Ensembl FTP site (10min)
  • Using our popular Variant Effect Predictor (VEP) to annotate variants against Ensembl genes to determine the variants’ effects including SIFT and PolyPhen. We will look at a small query using the web interface and a whole-genome query using the standalone script (20min)

Participants are encouraged to bring existing questions for a Q&A session.

Workshop requirements: You must bring your laptop. Your laptop should have full battery power and must have a wireless card.

For more information please visit the meeting homepage