New NCBI RefSeq tracks released!

[Matthew Speir]

We are pleased to announce the release of a new set of gene annotation tracks for the hg38/GRCh38 assembly based on data from NCBI's Reference Sequence Database (RefSeq). For all of these tracks, the alignments and coordinates are provided by RefSeq. These tracks are organized in a composite track that includes:

• RefSeq All -- annotations from the curated and predicted sets
• RefSeq Curated -- curated annotations beginning with NM, NR, or YP
• RefSeq Predicted -- predicted annotations beginning with XM or XR
• RefSeq Other -- all other RefSeq annotations not included in RefSeq All
• RefSeq Alignments -- alignments of transcripts to the genome provided by RefSeq

The new composite track also includes a "UCSC RefSeq" track which is based on our original "RefSeq Genes" track. As with before, this UCSC track is a result of our realignments of RefSeq RNAs to the genome which means that there may be some cases where the annotations differ from those in the new NCBI RefSeq tracks.

More details about these tracks, how they were constructed, and accessing their underlying data can be found in our blog, http://genome.ucsc.edu/blog/the-new-ncbi-refseq-tracks-and-you/, or on the track description page, http://genome.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin/hgTrackUi?db=hg38&g=refSeqComposite.

A huge thank you to Terence Murphy from the RefSeq group and to Hiram Clawson, Brian Raney, Mark Diekhans, Matthew Speir and many others from the UCSC Genome Browser staff for bringing this track to life.

-------

Matthew Speir
UCSC Genome Bioinformatics Group