You can check the release log.

We've asked in the past for something like an RSS feed of this, but I don't remember that ever coming together.

There are mailing lists of various types. But the "announce" is usually only big things like a whole new species. ENCODE announce sometimes does individual tracks. But not consistently.

Release log is your best best.

Mailing lists:

• Main
• ENCODE

There's also a mirror list if you maintain a mirror site, probably not relevant--but FYI.

To add to Mary's great answer, there is a field on each track's description page called "Data last updated:" that may be helpful for those wanting update information directly from the Genome Browser [GB] or database tables.

To web browse/extract this update tag in the GB, and example would be: [?]- UCSC browser [?]- select "Human Feb. 2009 (GRCh37/hg19)" aka hg19 [?]- on the assembly browser page, click on any track name [?]- in the top section, bottom field is "Data last updated:"

Please note that for composite tracks you will need to click into one of the sub-tracks to view the update date, as each is independently created/updated.

A way to retrieve the data in a table/file format is to use the Table Browser [TB] (or direct FTP, or the public mySQL database) and navigate to the database.table == hgFixed.trackVersion. The database, track name, update time, etc. is all there.

The path in the TB is a bit different than a regular database query: [?]- start with any database [?]- select group: all tables, database: hgFixed, and table: hgFixed.trackVersion [?]- download the table

Hopefully this is helpful! [?]jen