UCSC Genome Browser Home

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23 September 2015 New keyboard shortcuts on the Genome Browser!

We are excited to announce the addition of keyboard shortcuts to navigate the Genome Browser display! It's now possible to zoom in and out, navigate left and right, hide all tracks, configure the browser display and much more using only your keyboard. Use the "?" key to view the entire list of shortcuts. Happy browsing!

Credit goes to Max Haeussler for implementing this new feature.

14 September 2015 Human Genome Browser default changed to GRCh38/hg38

In conjunction with the release of the new 100-species Conservation track on the hg38/GRCh38 human assembly, we have now changed the default human browser on our website from hg19 to hg38. This should not affect your current browsing sessions; if you were last looking at the hg19 (or older) browser, the Genome Browser will continue to display that assembly for you when you start it up. There are circumstances, however, in which the selected assembly can switch to the newer version. For instance, the assembly will switch to hg38 if you reset your browser defaults. If you find yourself in a situation where some of your favorite browser tracks have "disappeared", you may want to check that you're viewing the right assembly.

We will continue our efforts to expand the annotation track set on the hg38 browser to include many of the tracks present on previous human assemblies. In cases where it makes sense, data may be simply "lifted" from hg19 using migration tools. In many instances, however, we must rely on our data providers to generate new versions of their data on the latest assembly. We will publish these data sets as they become available.

For a summary of the new features in the GRCh38 assembly, see the overview we published in March 2014.

10 September 2015 100 Species Conservation Track now available on GRCh38/hg38

We are pleased to announce the release of a new Conservation track based on the human (GRCh38/hg38) assembly. This track shows multiple alignments of 100 vertebrate species and measurements of evolutionary conservation using two methods (phastCons and phyloP) from the PHAST package for all species. The multiple alignments were generated using multiz and other tools in the UCSC/Penn State Bioinformatics comparative genomics alignment pipeline. Conserved elements identified by phastCons are also displayed in this track. For more details, visit the track description page.

We would like to thank Hiram Clawson and Jonathan Casper for their efforts in creating this track.

12 August 2015 New blog post: How to share your UCSC screenthoughts: We talk about saving static images and dynamic Browser sessions in a new blog post, and discuss some of the advantages and pitfalls of each. Read more.

29 June 2015 GENCODE Genes Now Default Gene Set on the Human (GRCh38/hg38) Assembly: In a move towards standardizing on a common gene set within the bioinformatics community, UCSC has made the decision to adopt the GENCODE set of gene models as our default gene set on the human genome assembly. Read more.

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UCSC Genome Browser Home