Annotation

Ensembl is working with the broader rat genomics community (RGD) to provide annotation of the rat genome. We have also participated in the STAR consortium to help identify and map single nucleotide polymorphisms in the rat.

The Rat RGSC 3.4 assembly was annotated using the standard Ensembl GeneBuild pipeline. To improve the gene set, we have incorporated new data resources which have become available since the last RGSC 3.4 genebuild (August 2006), including an updated rat-specific repeat library, additional RefSeq and Uniprot protein sequence data for predicting the coding regions of protein-coding genes, as well as new cDNAs and ESTs for annotating untranslated regions (UTRs) of protein-coding genes. This results in the extension of previously partially-predicted genes, merging of genes which were previously mis-annotated as two distinct neighbouring genes, and the recovery of new rat genes with mammalian orthologues.


In release 57 (March 2010), the mitochondrial sequence has been replaced with the NC_001665 sequence.