[genome-announce] New NCBI RefSeq tracks for human, rat, yeast, C. elegans, zebrafish, X. tropicalis and fly

[Christopher Lee]

Hello everyone!

We are pleased to announce the release of a new set of gene annotation tracks for the hg19/GRCh37, hg38/GRCh38, rn6/GRSC 6.0, sacCer3/S288c, ce10/WS220, ce11/WBcel235, danRer10/GRCz10, danRer11/GRCz11, xenTro7/JGI 7.0, xenTro9/Xenopus_tropicalis_v9.1 and dm6/BDGP Release 6 assemblies 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 – 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 that 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. Also note that the Predictions subtrack is unavailable for the following assemblies: hg19, dm6, ce11, and sacCer3.

More details about these tracks, their construction, and how to access their underlying data can be found on this blog post.

A huge thank you to Terence Murphy from the RefSeq group and to Hiram Clawson, Angie Hinrichs, Christopher Lee and many others from the UCSC Genome Browser staff for bringing this track to life.