Genome-euro is an official European mirror site of the UCSC Genome Browser, located at http://genome-euro.ucsc.edu. The server is physically located at the Universität Bielefeld Center for Biotechnology in Bielefeld, Germany, and is administered by UCSC. Genome-euro is meant to be an alternate, faster access point for those Browser users who are geographically closer to central Europe than to the western United States.

When European users navigate to the U.S. server home page (and conversely, when U.S. users navigate to the European server) and click the "Genomes" menu item, they will receive a notification at the top of the window that they have been redirected to the more geographically-appropriate server. At this point, one of two things can happen:

1. The user may choose to remain on the redirected server and proceed normally.
2. The user may click the provided link back to the original server. When this occurs, a cookie is created in the user's Internet browser remembering this choice and in the future, no automatic redirection will occur.

The user may also manually select a server at any time by mousing over the "Mirrors" menu item, illustrated below. Note that manually selecting a server will also create a cookie that will disable automatic redirection. Automatic redirection can be re-enabled by clearing cookies.

Many thanks to our colleagues at the Universität Bielefeld Center for Biotechnology for hosting this server.

When genome-euro is first activated, the genome-euro Saved Sessions database will be an identical copy of the Saved Sessions database from the U.S. server, so Saved Session data will be the same on the two servers except for Custom Tracks. After the initial activation of genome-euro, however, the Saved Sessions between the two servers will begin to diverge. New Saved Sessions or modifications to existing Saved Sessions will NOT be copied from one server to the other, so a new Saved Session created on the U.S. server will NOT be available on genome-euro and vice versa.

Custom Track data, including those Custom Tracks belonging to Saved Sessions, will NOT be copied from the U.S. server to genome-euro, even at the initial activation of genome-euro. Any Custom Tracks that exist on the U.S. server will need to be manually downloaded from the Table Browser or otherwise manually recreated if users would like them to be present on genome-euro.

Once Custom Tracks are loaded onto genome-euro, a Saved Session may be re-saved under the same name to reconstitute the original session with all associated Custom Tracks.

If you would like your custom data to be easily available on both the genome-euro mirror and the UCSC Genome Browser site, we highly recommend creating a Track Hub.

A track hub has the benefit of being hosted on your site allowing more control, ensuring data persistence, minimizing upload time to the browser, simplifying sharing of data, and optimizing track functionality.