For the last decade we have been holding hands-on workshops at the European and International Zebrafish Conferences to introduce zebrafish researchers to web resources for zebrafish genomics data. These workshops provided talks and exercises about the generation, evaluation and improvement of the genome reference sequence assembly, the reference gene set and state-of the art web resources used for data access, analysis and interpretation. In the absence of a framework to provide such a workshop this year, we will present a summary of the usual topics and recent updates.
Both the reference genome assembly, curated by the Genome Reference Consortium, and the gene set, curated by the Havana group, have reached a level of quality that is comparable to that of other model organisms, for instance mouse. This enables us to now embark on sequencing and analysing additional zebrafish strains, and identifying notable variation to be included in future assembly releases.
As always, we welcome community input to alert us to remaining issues and focus on their resolution. Please visit us at the poster and/or write to us at zfish-help@sanger.ac.uk. The latest gene sets can be accessed at vega.sanger.ac.uk and the assembly evaluation browser gEVAL (geval.sanger.ac.uk) allows the assessment of individual genomic regions to support further improvements.