
NCBI, producer and host of the GenBank database.
The 'GenBank'
sequence database is an
open access, annotated collection of all publicly available
nucleotide sequences and their
protein translations. This database is produced at
National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) as part of the
International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration, or
INSDC. GenBank and its collaborators receive sequences produced in laboratories throughout the world from more than 100,000 distinct organisms. GenBank continues to grow at an exponential rate, doubling every 10 months. Release 155, produced in
August 2006, contained over 65 billion nucleotide bases in more than 61 million sequences. GenBank is built by direct submissions from individual laboratories, as well as from bulk submissions from large-scale sequencing centers.
Direct submissions are made to GenBank using
BankIt, which is a Web-based form, or the stand-alone submission program, Sequin. Upon receipt of a sequence submission, the GenBank staff assigns an
Accession number to the sequence and performs quality assurance checks. The submissions are then released to the public database, where the entries are retrievable by
Entrez or downloadable by
FTP. Bulk submissions of
Expressed Sequence Tag (EST),
Sequence Tagged Site (STS),
Genome Survey Sequence (GSS), and
High-Throughput Genome Sequence (HTGS) data are most often submitted by large-scale sequencing centers. The GenBank direct submissions group also processes complete microbial genome sequences.
History
Walter Goad of the
Theoretical Biology and Biophysics Group at
Los Alamos National Laboratory and others established the Los Alamos Sequence Database in 1979, which culminated in 1982 with the creation of the public GenBank funded by the
National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense. LANL collaborated on GenBank with the firm Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, and by the end of 1983 more than 2,000 sequences were stored in it.
In the mid 1980s, the Intelligenetics bioinformatics company at
Stanford University managed the GenBank project in collaboration with LANL. As one of the earliest
bioinformatics community projects on the Internet, the GenBank project started
BIOSCI/Bionet news groups for promoting
open access communications among bioscientists. During 1989 to 1992, the GenBank project transitioned to the newly created
National Center for Biotechnology Information.
Growth of GenBank

Growth of genbank.png
★ ''source of data: [ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/genbank/gbrel.txt]''
See also
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Ensembl
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HPRD
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Sequence analysis
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Sequence profiling tool
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Sequence motif
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UniProt
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List of sequenced eukaryotic genomes
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List of sequenced archeal genomes
References
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Walter Goad, GenBank founder, obituary
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Recent changes in the GenBank On-line Service., Benton, D., , , Nucleic Acids Research, 1990
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LANL GenBank History
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GenBank, Benton, D. ''et al.'', , , Nucleic Acids Research, 2006
External links
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GenBank
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Example sequence record, for hemoglobin beta
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BankIt
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Sequin
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Emboss
Sources
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