97805fb2ceb73357aa78aa94107148dc355d4e1c mspeir Tue Sep 22 08:36:22 2026 -0700 Conservation tracks: give the description pages a real Data Access section, refs #34803 The hgdownload link block on these pages had no header, and on 18 of them it sat above the Description, which is where it got overlooked. Move it into an
The track configuration options allow the user to display either the vertebrate or placental mammal conservation scores, or both simultaneously. In full and pack display modes, conservation scores are displayed as a wiggle track (histogram) in which the height reflects the size of the score. The conservation wiggles can be configured in a variety of ways to highlight different aspects of the displayed information. Click the Graph configuration help link for an explanation of the configuration options.
Pairwise alignments of each species to the $organism genome are @@ -362,30 +352,60 @@ scores reflect the phylogeny (including branch lengths) of the species in question, a continuous-time Markov model of the nucleotide substitution process, and a tendency for conservation levels to be autocorrelated along the genome (i.e., to be similar at adjacent sites). The general reversible (REV) substitution model was used. Unlike many conservation-scoring programs, note that phastCons does not rely on a sliding window of fixed size; therefore, short highly-conserved regions and long moderately conserved regions can both obtain high scores. More information about phastCons can be found in Siepel et al. 2005.
PhastCons currently treats alignment gaps as missing data, which sometimes has the effect of producing undesirably high conservation scores in gappy regions of the alignment. We are looking at several possible ways of improving the handling of alignment gaps.
++The alignments and the conservation scores can be retrieved for a single region or for a list of +regions with the Table Browser, +which returns the alignments in MAF format and the scores as wiggle data. The scores and the +conserved elements, though not the alignments, can also be joined with other annotations in the +Data Integrator. For automated access, our REST API serves the alignment and conservation tracks +individually, by name. +
++Downloads for data in this track are available: +
+Genome-wide alignment files are large. Among our command-line programs, mafsInRegion, +mafSpeciesSubset and mafFrags pull out a region, a subset of species, or the +alignment underlying a gene. They can be downloaded from the utilities directory, and +each one prints its usage when run with no arguments. See our Data Access FAQ for more information. +
+This track was created using the following programs: