The Ensembl Genomes Project, including Ensembl Plants, is pleased to announce release 18 of Ensembl Genomes.

This release adds a second legume, Medicago truncatula (barrel clover), visualisation of the Hordeum vulgare (barley) physical map anchoring the gene-ome, and whole genome alignmetns between barley, rice and brachypodium. Updates include migrating Zea mays (maize) to assembly version 3, enabling the assembly converter tool between these versions, and new variation datasets for barley and Brachypodium distachyon as well as alignments of Triticum aestivum (bread wheat) WGS, TSA and EST assemblies against these cereal genomes. In addition we have updated our protein domain predictions and cross references for almost all genomes, and created new pairwise alignments between several genome sequences. Read more on the Ensembl Plants homepage for details.