+Do you have a favorite species or a research organism for which you'd like to visualize +the genomic sequence? With the recent addition of genomic assemblies for more than 1,300 +species, it's possible that your favorite is now available in the UCSC Genome Browser. +Check this list of new assemblies +to see if yours is a click away. Each of these Genome Browser assembly hubs comes pre-loaded +with several annotation tracks, gene models, and the ability to align genomic sequence to +the reference assembly using the BLAT +alignment tool. You can add your own data to your view of the assembly hub by uploading a +custom track +or creating a track hub.
++We call this group of assembly hubs, the +Genome Archive (GenArk). The genomes in the GenArk are sourced from +NCBI RefSeq, +the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP) +and other projects. See the complete list of assembly hubs here.
+
+GenArk assemblies can be found by searching the common name (e.g.
+ American Beaver) or GCA/GCF accession
+(e.g. GCF_001984765.1) directly on the
+Genome Browser Gateway page.
+A full list can also be seen on the GenArk portal which
+is organized by phylogenetic groups and projects:
+
+
| Primates | +Assembly statistics | +Track statistics |
| Mammals | +Assembly statistics | +Track statistics |
| Birds | +Assembly statistics | +Track statistics |
| Fishes | +Assembly statistics | +Track statistics |
| Vertebrates | +Assembly statistics | +Track statistics |
| Invertebrates | +Assembly statistics | +Track statistics |
| Fungi | +Assembly statistics | +Track statistics |
| Plants | +Assembly statistics | +Track statistics |
| VGP | +Assembly statistics | +Track statistics |
| Legacy | +Assembly statistics | +Track statistics |
| Global Reference | ++ | |
| Mouse Strains | ++ |
+The number of NCBI RefSeq assemblies has been increasing each year, and we expect the trend to continue as assemblies +from VGP, and other projects are released. Our next step is to add additional clades to GenArk including archaea, +viruses, and bacteria.
+ ++As mentioned above, assembly hubs in the GenArk allow for sequence alignment using the BLAT tool. We extended our traditional +BLAT tool to accommodate these assembly hubs and we call it +Dynamic BLAT. Dynamic BLAT +pre-computes index genomes files, which allows assemblies to have a BLAT server without needing it to be resident in the +computer's memory. Dynamic BLAT allows us to offer BLAT services on nearly all of our GenArk assemblies, with a few exceptions +due to excessive genome size.
+ ++We would like to thank NCBI RefSeq and Vertebrate Genome Project (VGP) for making these assemblies available. We would also +like to thank Hiram Clawson, Mark Diekhans, Galt Barber, Lou Nassar, and Gerardo Perez, and the rest of the Browser team +for their work on building the assembly hubs, creating GenArk, and extending BLAT to include these new assembly hubs.
+ +We are happy to announce the release of the Vaccines track for the UCSC SARS-CoV-2 Genome Browser. This track shows the alignment of three different mRNA vaccine sequences to the coronavirus genome: