The BioMart Community Portal (www.biomart.org) is a community-driven effort to provide a unified interface to biomedical databases that are distributed worldwide. The portal provides access to numerous database projects supported by 30 scientific organizations. It includes over 800 different biological datasets spanning genomics, proteomics, model organisms, cancer data, ontology information and more. All resources available through the portal are independently administered and funded by their host organizations. The BioMart data federation technology provides a unified interface to all the available data. The latest version of the portal comes with many new databases that have been created by our ever-growing community. It also comes with better support and extensibility for data analysis and visualization tools. A new addition to our toolbox, the enrichment analysis tool is now accessible through graphical and web service interface. The BioMart community portal averages over one million requests per day. Building on this level of service and the wealth of information that has become available, the BioMart Community Portal has introduced a new, more scalable and cheaper alternative to the large data stores maintained by specialized organizations.

Despite the many approaches to study differential splicing from RNA-seq, many challenges remain unsolved, including computing capacity and sequencing depth requirements. Here we present SUPPA2, a new method that addresses these challenges, and enables streamlined analysis across multiple conditions taking into account biological variability. Using experimental and simulated data, we show that SUPPA2 achieves higher accuracy compared to other methods, especially at low sequencing depth and short read length. We use SUPPA2 to identify novel Transformer2-regulated exons, novel microexons induced during differentiation of bipolar neurons, and novel intron retention events during erythroblast differentiation.

Alternative splicing changes are frequently observed in cancer and are starting to be recognized as important signatures for tumor progression and therapy. However, their functional impact and relevance to tumorigenesis remain mostly unknown. We carried out a systematic analysis to characterize the potential functional consequences of alternative splicing changes in thousands of tumor samples. This analysis revealed that a subset of alternative splicing changes affect protein domain families that are frequently mutated in tumors and potentially disrupt protein-protein interactions in cancer-related pathways. Moreover, there was a negative correlation between the number of these alternative splicing changes in a sample and the number of somatic mutations in drivers. We propose that a subset of the alternative splicing changes observed in tumors may represent independent oncogenic processes that could be relevant to explain the functional transformations in cancer, and some of them could potentially be considered alternative splicing drivers (AS drivers).

Ensembl (http://www.ensembl.org/) is a bioinformatics project to organize biological information around the sequences of large genomes. It is a comprehensive source of stable automatic annotation of individual genomes, and of the synteny and orthology relationships between them. It is also a framework for integration of any biological data that can be mapped onto features derived from the genomic sequence. Ensembl is available as an interactive Web site, a set of flat files, and as a complete, portable open source software system for handling genomes. All data are provided without restriction, and code is freely available. Ensembl's aims are to continue to “widen” this biological integration to include other model organisms relevant to understanding human biology as they become available; to “deepen” this integration to provide an ever more seamless linkage between equivalent components in different species; and to provide further classification of functional elements in the genome that have been previously elusive.