The Ensembl Genomes Project, including Ensembl Plants, is pleased to announce release 16 of Ensembl Genomes.

In this release, new species in Ensembl Plants include Hordeum vulgare (barley), Solanum tuberosum (potato) and Musa acuminata (banana). Improvements on the wheat assembly and the ability to highlight annotations in gene trees have also been released.

Barley is among the world’s earliest domesticated crop species, is the fourth most abundant cereal worldwide and is a traditional model for plant genetic research. It has a large diploid genome of about 5.1Gb in size. A draft genome sequence containing the majority of barley genes and integrated with the physical map has been recently published in Nature. The genome is now available in Ensembl Plants.

We have improved the alignment of a draft wheat assembly to Brachypodium distachyon and updated our presentation of wheat homoeologous SNPs using the Brachypodium reference.

For more details, see the Ensembl Genomes Project, including Ensembl Plants.