We are pleased to announce that the UCSC Genome Browser now supports data in bigGenePred format. bigGenePred format stores annotation items that are a linked collection of exons, much as BED files do, but bigGenePred has additional information about the coding frames and other gene specific information. bigGenePred files are created initially from BED-type files with some extra fields, using the program bedToBigBed with a special AutoSQL file that defines the fields of the bigGenePred. The resulting bigBed files are in an indexed binary format. The advantage of these bigBed files is that only portions of the files needed to display a particular region are transferred to UCSC. So for large data sets, bigBed is considerably faster than regular BED files.
This new format is available for use in custom tracks and data hubs. For more information about bigGenePred, please see our - bigGenePred Track Format help page. + bigGenePred Track Format help page.
02 April 2015 - New Tarsier (tarSyr2) Assembly Now Available in the Genome Browser
We are pleased to announce the release of a Genome Browser for the September 2013 assembly of tarsier, Tarsius syrichta (WashU Tarsius_syrichta-2.0.1, UCSC version tarSyr2). The whole genome shotgun assembly was provided by Washington University. There are 337,189 scaffolds with a total size of 3,453,864,774 bases.