UPDATE SUMMARY
The UCSC Genome Browser (https://genome.ucsc.edu) is an omics data consolidator, graphical viewer, and general bioinformatics resource that continues to serve the community as it enters its 23rd year. This year has seen an emphasis in clinical data, with new tracks and an expanded Recommended Track Sets feature on hg38 as well as the addition of a single cell track group. SARS-CoV-2 continues to remain a focus, with regular annotation updates to the browser and continued curation of our phylogenetic sequence placing tool, hgPhyloPlace, whose tree has now reached over 12M sequences. Our GenArk resource has also grown, offering over 2500 hubs and a system for users to request any absent assemblies. We have expanded our bigBarChart display type and created new ways to visualize data via bigRmsk and dynseq display. Displaying custom annotations is now easier due to our chromAlias system which eliminates the requirement for renaming sequence names to the UCSC standard. Users involved in data generation may also be interested in our new tools and trackDb settings which facilitate the creation and display of their custom annotations.
FUTURE PLANS
This coming year represents the first in our new 5-year planning cycle. A major goal during this time is evaluation and adoption of a pangenome graph data format. We will also be releasing a new site-wide search function and a track duplication feature. Work continues to expand hub support. Most new data will be created in big formats and new assemblies will be implemented as hubs instead of SQL databases (e.g. hs1). Along those lines, work will begin on a tool to facilitate hub development. Lastly, an emphasis on clinical genomics and single cell data will continue, with features such as Recommended Track Sets and the new single cell track group seeing updates throughout the year.