FTP Download
API Code
If you do not have access to CVS, you can obtain our latest API code as a gzipped tarball:
Download complete API for this release
Note: the API version needs to be the same as the databases you are accessing, so please use CVS to obtain a previous version if querying older databases.
Database dumps
Entire databases can be downloaded from our FTP site in a variety of formats. Please be aware that some of these files can run to many gigabytes of data.
Looking for MySQL dumps to install databases locally? See our web installation instructions for full details.
Each directory on ftp.ensembl.org contains a README file, explaining the directory structure.
Multi-species data
Database | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Comparative genomics | MySQL | EMF | BED | XML | Ancestral Alleles |
BioMart | MySQL | - | - | - | - |
Single species data
To facilitate storage and download all databases are GNU Zip (gzip, *.gz) compressed.
About the data
The following types of data dumps are available on the FTP site.
- FASTA
- FASTA sequence databases of Ensembl gene, transcript and protein
model predictions. Since the
FASTA format does not permit sequence annotation,
these database files are mainly intended for use with local sequence
similarity search algorithms. Each directory has a README file with a
detailed description of the header line format and the file naming
conventions.
- DNA
- Masked and unmasked genome sequences associated with the assembly (contigs, chromosomes etc.).
- The header line in an FASTA dump files containing DNA sequence consists of the following attributes : coord_system:version:name:start:end:strand This coordinate-system string is used in the Ensembl API to retrieve slices with the SliceAdaptor.
- cDNA
- cDNA sequences for Ensembl or ab initio predicted genes.
- Peptides
- Protein sequences for Ensembl or ab initio predicted genes.
- RNA
- Non-coding RNA gene preditions.
- Annotated sequence
- Flat files allow more extensive sequence annotation by means of
feature tables and contain thus the genome sequence as annotated by
the automated Ensembl
genome
annotation pipeline. Each nucleotide sequence record in a flat
file represents a 1Mb slice of the genome sequence. Flat files are
broken into chunks of 1000 sequence records for easier downloading.
- EMBL
- Ensembl database dumps in EMBL nucleotide sequence database format
- GenBank
- Ensembl database dumps in GenBank nucleotide sequence database format
- MySQL
- All Ensembl MySQL databases are available in text format as are the SQL table definition files. These can be imported into to any SQL database for a local installation of a mirror site. Generally, the FTP directory tree contains one one directory per database. For more information about these databases and their Application Programming Interfaces (or APIs) see the API section.
- GTF
- Gene sets for each species. These files include annotations of both coding and non-coding genes. This file format is described here.
- EMF flatfile dumps (variation and comparative data)
-
Alignments of resequencing data are available for several species as Ensembl Multi Format (EMF) flatfile dumps. The accompanying README file describes the file format.
Also, the same format is used to dump whole-genome multiple alignments as well as gene-based multiple alignments and phylogentic trees used to infer Ensembl orthologues and paralogues. These files are available in the ensembl_compara database which will be found in the mysql directory.
- GVF (variation data)
- GVF (Genome Variation Format) is a simple tab-delimited format derived from GFF3 for variation positions across the genome. There are GVF files for different types of variation data (e.g. somatic variants, structural variants etc). For more information see the "README" files in the GVF directory.
- BED format files (comparative data)
-
Constrained elements calculated using GERP are available in BED format. For more information see the accompanying README file.
BED format is a simple line-based format. The first 3 mandatory columns are:
- chromosome name (may start with 'chr' for compliance with UCSC)
- start position. This is a 0-based position
- end position.
- Tarball
-
The entire Ensembl API is gzipped and concatenated into a single TAR file. This is updated daily.