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Smaller software changes are not announced here. A summary of the three-weekly release changes can be found here. For the full list of our daily code changes head to our GitHub page. Lastly, see our credits page for acknowledgments of the data we host.
+ ++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. +
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+ 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 to 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. +
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+ 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. +
+We are pleased to announce a new SNV Frequencies container track on the human assembly (GRCh38/hg38). The collection unifies single-nucleotide variant allele frequencies from 30+ population resequencing and biobank projects worldwide, covering roughly 1.7 million genomes, exomes, and genotyping arrays, into a single place where a variant's frequency can be compared across populations, ancestries, and disease cohorts.
The collection includes three combined tracks that aggregate the source