Genome assembly is cheaper, more accurate and more automated than it has ever been. This is due to a combination of more cost-efficient chemistries, new sequencing technologies and better algorithms. The livestock community has been at the forefront of this new wave of genome assembly, generating some of the highest quality vertebrate genome sequences. Ensembl's goal is to add functional and comparative annotation to these genomes, through our gene annotation, genomic alignments, gene trees, regulatory, and variation data. We run computationally complex analyses in a high throughput and consistent manner to help accelerate downstream science. Our livestock resources are continuously growing in both breadth and depth. We annotate reference genome assemblies for newly sequenced species and regularly update annotation for existing genomes. We are the only major resource to support the annotation of breeds and other non-reference assemblies. We currently provide resources for 13 pig breeds, maternal and paternal haplotypes for hybrid cattle and various other non-reference or wild type assemblies for livestock species. Here, we describe the livestock data present in Ensembl and provide protocols for how to view data in our genome browser, download via it our FTP site, manipulate it via our tools and interact with it programmatically via our REST API.
