Advanced notice of Ensembl Tools maintenance
Please note that due to planned maintenance, Ensembl Tools will be unavailable from Tuesday, September 9, at 08:30 AM BST until Wednesday, September 10, at 08:30 AM BST.
Jobs submitted during the maintenance window will be queued and processed once maintenance is complete. We apologise for the inconvenience.

Regulatory features

Regulatory features

Genomic regions with primary data supporting a potential non-coding regulatory function are called regulatory features in Ensembl. The different types of regulatory features annotated include:

  • Promoters
  • Enhancers
  • Open chromatin regions (without evidence to classify as a promoter or enhancer)
  • CTCF binding sites

In addition, we indicate the location of Epigenetically Modified Accessible Regions (EMARs).

For each cell type (epigenome) regulatory features are assigned labels to describe their activity levels. These include:

  • ACTIVE, when the feature overlaps an open chromatin peak in the corresponding epigenome,
  • INACTIVE, when there is no corresponding open chromatin peak, and
  • NA, when there is no available data in the cell type for this feature.
More details can be found here.