[1] The VEGA browser is based on Ensembl web code and infrastructure and provides a public curation of known vertebrate genes for the scientific community.
[4] VEGA was developed by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and is in close association with other annotation databases, such as ZFIN (The Zebrafish Information Network), the Havana Group and GenBank.
[1][5] Manual annotation is currently more accurate at identifying splice variants, pseudogenes, polyadenylation features, non-coding regions and complex gene arrangements than automated methods.
[5] The Vertebrate Genome Annotation (VEGA) database was first made public in 2004 by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
[6] Manual annotation of genomic data is extremely valuable to produce an accurate reference gene set but is expensive compared with automatic methods and so has been limited to model organisms.
The Vega database is the central repository for the majority of genome sequencing centers to deposit their annotation of human chromosomes.
[6] Since the original VEGA publication, the number of human gene loci annotated has more than doubled to over 49,000 (September 2012 release), over 20,000 of which are predicted to be protein coding.
Implicated in the control of immune response and susceptibility to a range of diseases, the pig MHC plays a unique role in histocompatibility.
Note that although the pipeline generates phylogenetic genetrees, the limited scope of the Vega comparative analysis means that these will necessarily be incomplete and consequently only orthologs are shown on the website.
The MHC region has been compared between dog, pig (two assemblies), gorilla, chimpanzee, wallaby, mouse and eight human haplotypes: 2.