I work in the Human and Vertebrate Analysis and Annotation (Havana) team. My major resposibility is the annotation of the rat reference genome with an aim to improve the reference gene set in collaboration with Ensembl. A major task is to build community engagement in collaboration with Ensembl. Towards this aim we organise rat annotation jamborees and workshops which bring together community experts, the Rat Genome Database (RGD) , Havana manual annotators and Ensembl developers to discuss methods to improve rat gene annotation. Regions of interest have been targeted for manual annotation and are visible within the Vega Browser, and are merged periodically into the Ensembl gene set. To nominate a gene or region of interest to be manually annotated please contact us at rat-annotation@sanger.ac.uk