There are many other tracks in the group "Genes and Gene Predictions". Genscan and N-Scan are older transcript predictor algorithms that are based on the genome sequence alone. Augustus and AceView are automated gene-predictors that use cDNA and EST data. These and similar gene tracks are only relevant when you are working on a particular locus where you think that the manually curated gene models (Ensembl and RefSeq) have errors.
+To illustrate these differences, here is an overview of a few different tracks on human (hg38) and how many transcripts they contain as of March 2019: +| Track name | +Number of transcripts | +
|---|---|
| Known Gene (Gencode comprehensive V29) | +226,811 | +
| Known Gene (Gencode basic V29) | +112,634 | +
| NCBI RefSeq Predicted Transcripts | +94,389 | +
| UCSC RefSeq (Curated) | +80,694 | +
| NCBI RefSeq Curated | +73,080 | +
| CCDS | +32,506 | +
Gene symbols like BRCA1 are easy to remember but sometimes change and are not
specific to an organism. Therefore most databases internally use unique
identifiers to refer to sequences and some journals require authors to use
these in manuscripts.
The most common accession numbers encountered by users are either from Ensembl,
GENCODE or RefSeq. Human Ensembl/GENCODE gene accession numbers start with
ENSG, e.g. "ENSG00000012048" for BRCA1. Every ENSG-gene has at least
one transcript assigned to it. The transcript identifiers start with with ENST
followed by a number, e.g. "ENST00000619216.1". NCBI refers to genes
with plain numbers, e.g. 672 for BRCA1. Manually curated RefSeq transcript