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. 2015 Jan 1;31(1):143-5.
doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btu613. Epub 2014 Sep 17.

The Ensembl REST API: Ensembl Data for Any Language

Andrew Yates  1 , Kathryn Beal  1 , Stephen Keenan  1 , William McLaren  1 , Miguel Pignatelli  1 , Graham R S Ritchie  2 , Magali Ruffier  1 , Kieron Taylor  1 , Alessandro Vullo  1 , Paul Flicek  2
Affiliations

The Ensembl REST API: Ensembl Data for Any Language

Andrew Yates et al. Bioinformatics. .

Abstract

Motivation: We present a Web service to access Ensembl data using Representational State Transfer (REST). The Ensembl REST server enables the easy retrieval of a wide range of Ensembl data by most programming languages, using standard formats such as JSON and FASTA while minimizing client work. We also introduce bindings to the popular Ensembl Variant Effect Predictor tool permitting large-scale programmatic variant analysis independent of any specific programming language.

Availability and implementation: The Ensembl REST API can be accessed at http://rest.ensembl.org and source code is freely available under an Apache 2.0 license from http://github.com/Ensembl/ensembl-rest.

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