[genome-announce] UCSC Genome Browser reaches version 500
Jairo Navarro Gonzalez
Today, we are releasing version 500 of the UCSC Genome Browser. We are glad this milestone falls on July 7, the 26th anniversary of the day in 2000 when the first publicly available assembly of the human genome working draft was posted on the web here at UC Santa Cruz.
Total web traffic at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2000. The spike near July 7 shows the surge of downloads when the first human genome assembly was posted. When the genome became available online, all other web activity at the university shrank into the background.
That first assembly came from Jim Kent's GigAssembler in the spring of 2000, and it made the draft human sequence freely available to everyone. Even then, that track-based way of viewing a genome was not new. It came out of the Intronerator, an earlier tool Kent built to explore the C. elegans genome, shown below.
The Intronerator, Jim Kent's C. elegans tool from 2000. It showed cosmids, gene predictions, cDNA/EST alignments, and C. briggsae homologies as horizontal tracks over a genomic ruler, much like the Genome Browser does today.
Five hundred versions later, the Genome Browser serves thousands of genome assemblies across the tree of life, tens of thousands of annotation tracks, and a global community of researchers, clinicians, educators, and students. Each of those 500 versions added something new: assemblies and tracks, bug fixes, performance improvements, and features requested by our users. We are glad to reach this number, and to keep the data free and open, as it has been since that first release on July 7, 2000.
We would like to thank the many collaborators and data providers whose work fills the Genome Browser, the worldwide community of users whose questions and feedback shape it, and every past and present member of the UCSC Genome Browser team (engineers, quality assurance, outreach, and support) who have carried the project from its first assembly to version 500. The people behind those 500 versions are listed on our staff page, and you can read more about how the project began on our history page. We are grateful to everyone who helped us reach this milestone, and we look forward to the versions still to come.
Jairo Navarro
UCSC Genome Browser
UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute
Revealing life’s code.
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