Welcome to the UCSC Genome Browser website. This site contains the reference sequence and working draft assemblies for a large collection of genomes. It also provides a portal to the ENCODE project.

We encourage you to explore these sequences with our tools. The Genome Browser zooms and scrolls over chromosomes, showing the work of annotators worldwide. The Gene Sorter shows expression, homology and other information on groups of genes that can be related in many ways. Blat quickly maps your sequence to the genome. The Table Browser provides convenient access to the underlying database. VisiGene lets you browse through a large collection of in situ mouse and frog images to examine expression patterns. Genome Graphs allows you to upload and display genome-wide data sets.

The UCSC Genome Browser is developed and maintained by the Genome Bioinformatics Group, a cross-departmental team within the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering (CBSE) at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC). If you have feedback or questions concerning the tools or data on this website, feel free to contact us on our public mailing list.

To receive announcements of new genome assembly releases, new software features, updates and training seminars by email, subscribe to the genome-announce mailing list.

We are pleased to announce the availability of a public Genome Browser mirror for the Australasian research community: http://genome.qfab.org.

The Queensland Facility for Advanced Bioinformatics (QFAB), in conjunction with the University of Queensland, Australia, maintains this full mirror of the UCSC Genome Browser, which is sponsored by the Australian Research Council. The QFAB mirror offers alternative access to the Genome Browser data when the UCSC site is unavailable, and may provide better performance for our Australasian users.

We'd like to extend our thanks to QFAB for providing and maintaining this mirror, and in particular to Jeremy Barker and Michael Pheasant for their collaborative work with UCSC in setting up this site.

We are pleased to announce the release of the February 2009 human genome browser, UCSC version hg19.

Starting with this assembly, the human genome sequence is now provided by the Genome Reference Consortium, whose goal is to correct the small number of regions in the reference that are currently misrepresented, to close as many remaining gaps as possible and to produce alternative assemblies of structurally variant loci when necessary. The hg19 browser corresponds to GRCh37.

Statistics for the GRCh37 build assembly can be found on the NCBI Build 37.1 Statistics web page.

The hg19 browser contains 9 haplotypes. See the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute MHC Haplotype Project web site for additional information on the chr6 alternate haplotype assemblies.

The UCSC staff responsible for producing the initial hg19 browser include Hiram Clawson, Brooke Rhead, Pauline Fujita, Ann Zweig, Katrina Learned, and Robert Kuhn. See the Credits page for a detailed list of the organizations and individuals who contributed to this release.

The sequence and annotation data displayed in the Genome Browser are freely available for any use with the following conditions:

• Genome sequence data use restrictions are noted within the species sections on the Credits page.
• Some annotation tracks contributed by external collaborators contain proprietary data that have specific use restrictions. To check for restrictions associated with a particular genome assembly, review the database/README.txt file in the assembly's downloads directory.

The Genome Browser and Blat software are free for academic, nonprofit, and personal use. A license is required for commercial use. See the Licenses page for more information.

Program-driven use of this software is limited to a maximum of one hit every 15 seconds and no more than 5,000 hits per day.

For assistance with questions or problems regarding the UCSC Genome Browser software, database, genome assemblies, or release cycles, see the FAQ.

• Data organization and format
• Terminology