Ensembl

The Ensembl project is co-lead by Rob Finn and Andy Yates and receives input from an independent scientific advisory board. Ensembl is based at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute, which is located on the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, south of the city of Cambridge, United Kingdom.

The Ensembl project was started in 1999, some years before the draft human genome was completed. Even at that early stage it was clear that manual annotation of 3 billion base pairs of sequence would not be able to offer researchers timely access to the latest data. The goal of Ensembl was therefore to automatically annotate the genome, integrate this annotation with other available biological data and make all this publicly available via the web. Since the website's launch in July 2000, thousands of genomes have been added to Ensembl and the range of available data has also expanded to include comparative genomics, variation and regulatory data.

From 2026, genomes from across the tree of life are available together in a single Ensembl site. This new Ensembl platform will serve all new genome data going forward.