Which online browser at UC Santa Cruz presents human genome sequence data?

Which online browser at UC Santa Cruz presents human genome sequence data? The answer is the UCSC Genome Browser.

The browser was developed at the University of California, Santa Cruz, by graduate student Jim Kent and Professor David Haussler. In 2000, the team created it to give researchers practical online access to the Human Genome Project’s draft sequence. UCSC released an early working draft online on July 7, 2000.

Rather than showing only raw DNA letters, the browser layers information onto genome coordinates. Its graphical “tracks” can display genes, messenger-RNA alignments, repeats, predicted regulatory features, variants, disease associations and experimental datasets. Users can zoom from an entire chromosome to a single base and inspect the evidence around a region.

A common mix-up is confusing the browser with GenBank or dbSNP. GenBank is a sequence repository, while dbSNP catalogs short genetic variants. Ensembl is another major genome browser and annotation project, developed in Europe. UCSC’s distinctive contribution is its fast, track-based visual interface for comparing sequence with many kinds of genomic annotation.