Retirement of periodic ENA assembled/annotated sequence release in March 2020

The European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) captures, preserves and presents the world's nucleotide sequence data. Since 1982 the European Nucleotide Archive has made 140 individual releases, providing a quarterly snapshot of ENA assembled/annotated sequence data. During this time, changes to the ways in which users access ENA data have led us to develop a portfolio of data access tools, such as our daily FTP products and the ENA Browser API, which are currently offered in parallel to the traditional release. In recent years we have faced growing pressure on the release process in response to increases in data volume and have also seen a shift towards our newer services from the majority of users. Our release process has remained largely unchanged for the last two decades, and following an internal review we have concluded that it is no longer viable for us to continue the current release process as part of our presentation portfolio. 

We therefore announce that the last release in its current form will be release 143 in March 2020. New data is already included in the ENA on a continuous basis and distributed daily from our browser, FTP and RESTful API services. The key change is that we will no longer make an additional separate quarterly release of the assembled/annotated subset of sequences. We will focus our resources on further developing and supporting our continuous distribution presentation products.

As part of the release retirement we will no longer be creating cumulative FTP files in the FTP update folders (e.g. http://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/ena/sequence/update/). These cumulative files tracked daily changes in between release cycles and thus cannot continue to be produced sustainably. Release 143 will be the last available in the release folder (available here http://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/ena/sequence/release/), the update folder will be removed after this last release. Set based sequences have already been removed from the release and will continue to be added to the FTP in their corresponding folders (e.g. http://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/ena/wgs/public/; http://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/ena/tsa/public/; http://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/ena/tls/public/).

After the final release in March 2020 we will be merging the '_release' and '_update' data types for sequence, coding and non-coding. So the data types 'sequence_release' and 'sequence_update' will be replaced with the data type 'sequence'. This affects users of our API and browser advanced search services, you will need to switch to the updated data type end points. The new data types will be available in parallel and a separate announcement will be made when these new endpoints are available.

We have created the following guide (https://ena-browser-docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/help_and_guides/moving_from_release.html) to assist users in moving away from the release. This guide outlines accessing assembled/annotated sequences, guidance on how to identify data based on a last updated timestamp and advice for establishing your own mirroring procedures using our portfolio of other access services.

If you currently rely on any aspect of the separate assembled/annotated sequence release process for your work or resource, and cannot switch to one of our continuous distribution processes described in the above guide, please contact us urgently listing what features you utilised from the release process. We will discuss your requirements and determine how we might support your use case through one of our existing services or collaborate on an adapted or novel solution. Contacting us promptly with your requirements will allow us to ensure adequate time and resources to collaborate on a solution.
 
Please contact us with your questions or concerns at https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/support with the subject ‘ENA release retirement’.