[xelxebar]

Just curious, but what about non-vertebrates? I'd have expected there to be an official number/hash that identifies genes like the InChI Key for chemistry or something. IIRC, that key in particular is just a SHA-256 of a long human-readable "chemical formula".

[splike]

We'll cross that bridge when we come to it I guess, but we work almost exclusively with human and mouse genomes for now.

In any case, I imagine the Ensembl ID is still safer than other encodings in the case of invertebrates. For example, genes IDs in the Fruit fly genome look like FBgn0034730.