GenBank

From WikiMD's Wellness Encyclopedia

GenBank is the National Institutes of Health (NIH) genetic sequence database, an annotated collection of all publicly available DNA sequences. GenBank is part of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration, which comprises the DNA DataBank of Japan (DDBJ), the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA), and GenBank at NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). The GenBank database is designed to provide and encourage access within the scientific community to the most up-to-date and comprehensive DNA sequence information.

History[edit | edit source]

GenBank was established in 1982 by Walter Goad and Los Alamos National Laboratory. The GenBank project initially began as an informal system before becoming an official NIH project in 1983. The GenBank database has been maintained at NCBI since 1992.

Content[edit | edit source]

GenBank is a rich resource that provides data from all branches of life. The database includes sequences from genomes, genes, mRNA, rRNA, tRNA, and other types of nucleic acid sequences. GenBank also includes protein sequences that are derived from the translation of annotated coding regions in nucleotide sequences.

Access[edit | edit source]

GenBank data is accessible through the NCBI's 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.

See also[edit | edit source]

GenBank Resources

Contributors: Prab R. Tumpati, MD