D. A. Benson

GenBank® (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) is a comprehensive database that contains publicly available nucleotide sequences for almost 260 000 formally described species. These sequences are obtained primarily through submissions from individual laboratories and batch submissions from large-scale sequencing projects, including whole-genome shotgun (WGS) and environmental sampling projects. Most submissions are made using the web-based BankIt or standalone Sequin programs, and GenBank staff assigns accession numbers upon data receipt. Daily data exchange with the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) and the DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) ensures worldwide coverage. GenBank is accessible through the NCBI Entrez retrieval system, which integrates data from the major DNA and protein sequence databases along with taxonomy, genome, mapping, protein structure and domain information, and the biomedical journal literature via PubMed. BLAST provides sequence similarity searches of GenBank and other sequence databases. Complete bimonthly releases and daily updates of the GenBank database are available by FTP. To access GenBank and its related retrieval and analysis services, begin at the NCBI home page: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) provides a large suite of online resources for biological information and data, including the GenBank® nucleic acid sequence database and the PubMed database of citations and abstracts for published life science journals. The Entrez system provides search and retrieval operations for most of these data from 39 distinct databases. The E-utilities serve as the programming interface for the Entrez system. Augmenting many of the Web applications are custom implementations of the BLAST program optimized to search specialized data sets. New resources released in the past year include PubMed Data Management, RefSeq Functional Elements, genome data download, variation services API, Magic-BLAST, QuickBLASTp, and Identical Protein Groups. Resources that were updated in the past year include the genome data viewer, a human genome resources page, Gene, virus variation, OSIRIS, and PubChem. All of these resources can be accessed through the NCBI home page at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

In addition to maintaining the GenBank(R) nucleic acid sequence database, the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) provides analysis and retrieval resources for the data in GenBank and other biological data available through NCBI's web site. NCBI resources include Entrez, the Entrez Programming Utilities, My NCBI, PubMed, PubMed Central, Entrez Gene, the NCBI Taxonomy Browser, BLAST, BLAST Link, Electronic PCR, OrfFinder, Spidey, Splign, RefSeq, UniGene, HomoloGene, ProtEST, dbMHC, dbSNP, Cancer Chromosomes, Entrez Genome, Genome Project and related tools, the Trace, Assembly, and Short Read Archives, the Map Viewer, Model Maker, Evidence Viewer, Clusters of Orthologous Groups, Influenza Viral Resources, HIV-1/Human Protein Interaction Database, Gene Expression Omnibus, Entrez Probe, GENSAT, Database of Genotype and Phenotype, Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man, Online Mendelian Inheritance in Animals, the Molecular Modeling Database, the Conserved Domain Database, the Conserved Domain Architecture Retrieval Tool and the PubChem suite of small molecule databases. Augmenting the web applications are custom implementations of the BLAST program optimized to search specialized data sets. These resources can be accessed through the NCBI home page at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

GenBank is a comprehensive database that contains publicly available DNA sequences for more than 165,000 named organisms, obtained primarily through submissions from individual laboratories and batch submissions from large-scale sequencing projects. Most submissions are made using the web-based BankIt or standalone Sequin programs and accession numbers are assigned by GenBank staff upon receipt. Daily data exchange with the EMBL Data Library in the UK and the DNA Data Bank of Japan helps to ensure worldwide coverage. GenBank is accessible through NCBI's retrieval system, Entrez, which integrates data from the major DNA and protein sequence databases along with taxonomy, genome, mapping, protein structure and domain information, and the biomedical journal literature via PubMed. BLAST provides sequence similarity searches of GenBank and other sequence databases. Complete bimonthly releases and daily updates of the GenBank database are available by FTP. To access GenBank and its related retrieval and analysis services, go to the NCBI Homepage at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.