The accurate identification and description of the genes in the human and mouse genomes is a fundamental requirement for high quality analysis of data informing both genome biology and clinical genomics. Over the last 15 years, the GENCODE consortium has been producing reference quality gene annotations to provide this foundational resource. The GENCODE consortium includes both experimental and computational biology groups who work together to improve and extend the GENCODE gene annotation. Specifically, we generate primary data, create bioinformatics tools and provide analysis to support the work of expert manual gene annotators and automated gene annotation pipelines. In addition, manual and computational annotation workflows use any and all publicly available data and analysis, along with the research literature to identify and characterise gene loci to the highest standard. GENCODE gene annotations are accessible via the Ensembl and UCSC Genome Browsers, the Ensembl FTP site, Ensembl Biomart, Ensembl Perl and REST APIs as well as https://www.gencodegenes.org.

Launched in 2001 to showcase the draft human genome assembly, the UCSC Genome Browser database (http://genome.ucsc.edu) and associated tools continue to grow, providing a comprehensive resource of genome assemblies and annotations to scientists and students worldwide. Highlights of the past year include the release of a browser for the first new human genome reference assembly in 4 years in December 2013 (GRCh38, UCSC hg38), a watershed comparative genomics annotation (100-species multiple alignment and conservation) and a novel distribution mechanism for the browser (GBiB: Genome Browser in a Box). We created browsers for new species (Chinese hamster, elephant shark, minke whale), ‘mined the web’ for DNA sequences and expanded the browser display with stacked color graphs and region highlighting. As our user community increasingly adopts the UCSC track hub and assembly hub representations for sharing large-scale genomic annotation data sets and genome sequencing projects, our menu of public data hubs has tripled.

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After two decades of improvements, the current human reference genome (GRCh38) is the most accurate and complete vertebrate genome ever produced. However, no single chromosome has been finished end to end, and hundreds of unresolved gaps persist 1,2. Here we present a human genome assembly that surpasses the continuity of GRCh38 2 , along with a gapless, telomere-to-telomere assembly of a human chromosome. This was enabled by high-coverage, ultra-long-read nanopore sequencing of the complete hydatidiform mole CHM13 genome, combined with complementary technologies for quality improvement and validation. Focusing our efforts on the human X chromosome 3 , we reconstructed the centromeric satellite DNA array (approximately 3.1 Mb) and closed the 29 remaining gaps in the current reference, including new sequences from the human pseudoautosomal regions and from cancer-testis ampliconic gene families (CT-X and GAGE). These sequences will be integrated into future human reference genome releases. In addition, the complete chromosome X, combined with the ultra-long nanopore data, allowed us to map methylation patterns across complex tandem repeats and satellite arrays. Our results demonstrate that finishing the entire human genome is now within reach, and the data presented here will facilitate ongoing efforts to complete the other human chromosomes. Complete, telomere-to-telomere reference genome assemblies are necessary to ensure that all genomic variants are discovered and studied. At present, unresolved areas of the human genome are defined by multi-megabase satellite arrays in the pericentromeric regions and the ribosomal DNA arrays on acrocentric short arms, as well as regions enriched in segmental duplications that are greater than hundreds of kilobases in length and that exhibit sequence identity of more than 98% between paralogues. Owing to their absence from the reference, these repeat-rich sequences are often excluded from genetics and genomics studies, which limits the scope of association and functional analyses 4,5. Unresolved repeat sequences also result in unintended consequences; for example, paralogous sequence variants incorrectly being called as allelic variants 6 , and the contamination of bacterial gene databases 7. Completion of the entire human genome is expected to contribute to our understanding of chromosome function 8 , human disease 9 and genomic variation, which will improve technologies in biomedicine that use short-read mapping to a reference genome (for example, RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) 10 , chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing (ChIP-seq) 11 and assay for transposase-accessible chromatin using sequencing (ATAC-seq) 12). The fundamental challenge of reconstructing a genome from many comparatively short sequencing reads-a process known as genome assembly-is distinguishing the repeated sequences from one another 13. Resolving such repeats relies on sequencing reads that are long enough to span the entire repeat or accurate enough to distinguish each repeat copy on the basis of...

The UCSC Genome Browser (https://genome.ucsc.edu) provides a web interface for exploring annotated genome assemblies. The assemblies and annotation tracks are updated on an ongoing basis—12 assemblies and more than 28 tracks were added in the past year. Two recent additions are a display of CRISPR/Cas9 guide sequences and an interactive navigator for gene interactions. Other upgrades from the past year include a command-line version of the Variant Annotation Integrator, support for Human Genome Variation Society variant nomenclature input and output, and a revised highlighting tool that now supports multiple simultaneous regions and colors.

De novo assembly of a human genome using nanopore long-read sequences has been reported but it used more than 150,000 CPU hours and weeks of wall-clock time. To enable rapid human genome assembly we present Shasta, a de novo long read assembler, and polishing algorithms named MarginPolish and HELEN. Using a single PromethION nanopore sequencer and our toolkit, we assembled eleven highly contiguous human genomes de novo in nine days. We achieved ~63x coverage, 42 Kb read N50, and 6.5x coverage in 100 Kb+ reads using three flow cells per sample. Shasta produced a complete haploid human genome assembly in under six hours on a single commercial compute node. MarginPolish and HELEN polished haploid assemblies to more than 99.9% identity (QV30) with nanopore reads alone. Addition of proximity ligation (Hi-C) sequencing enabled near chromosome-level scaffolds for all eleven genomes. We compare our assembly performance to existing methods for diploid, haploid, and trio-binned human samples and report superior accuracy and speed.

Genetic studies of human evolution require high-quality contiguous ape genome assemblies that are not guided by the human reference. We coupled long-read sequence assembly, full-length cDNA sequencing with a multi-platform scaffolding approach to produce ab initio chimpanzee and orangutan genome assemblies. Comparing these with two long-read de novo human genome assemblies and a gorilla genome assembly, we characterized lineage-specific and shared great ape genetic variation ranging from single base-pair to megabase-sized variants. We identified ~17 thousand fixed human-specific structural variants identifying genic and putative regulatory changes that emerged in humans since divergence from nonhuman apes. Interestingly, these fixed human-specific structural variants are enriched near genes that are downregulated in human compared to chimpanzee cerebral organoids, particularly in cells analogous to radial glial neural progenitors.

The GENCODE project annotates human and mouse genes and transcripts supported by experimental data with high accuracy, providing a foundational resource that supports genome biology and clinical genomics. GENCODE annotation processes make use of primary data and bioinformatic tools and analysis generated both within the consortium and externally to support the creation of transcript structures and the determination of their function. Here, we present improvements to our annotation infrastructure, bioinformatics tools, and analysis, and the advances they support in the annotation of the human and mouse genomes including: the completion of first pass manual annotation for the mouse reference genome; targeted improvements to the annotation of genes associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection; collaborative projects to achieve convergence across reference annotation databases for the annotation of human and mouse protein-coding genes; and the first GENCODE manually supervised automated annotation of lncRNAs. Our annotation is accessible via Ensembl, the UCSC Genome Browser and https://www.gencodegenes.org.