International Nucleotide Sequence Database

GenBank is the NIH genetic sequence database, and an annotated collection of all publicly available DNA sequences. It is part of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration, which comprises the GenBank at NCBI, DNA DataBank of Japan (DDBJ), and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). These three organizations exchange data on a daily basis. 

The important DNA sequence data repositories as the primary resources known as International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration are ... 

International Nucleotide Sequence Database. URL http // www.ddbj.nig.ac.jp/. A joint compilation of heterogeneous sequence data into a redundant database. New and updated data shared daily by DNA Database of Japan (DDBJ). European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute EMBL-EBD- Cambridge, U.K. URL http // www.ebi.ac.uk/Databases/. GenBank. NCBI. URL http // www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Genbank/GenbankSearch.html. 

GenBank, EMBL, and DDBJ form the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration. The partnership databases are the richest source of publicly available annotated nucleotide sequences. The FT describes the features and syntax [28]. Although not all features involve patterns, many do. Examples include... 

Recently, the members of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (GenBank, EMBL, and DDBJ) introduced a better sequence identifier, one that combines an accession (which identifies a particular sequence record) with a version number (which tracks changes to the sequence itself). It is expected that this kind of Seq-id will become the preferred method of citing sequences. 

A full release of GenBank occins on a bimonthly schedule with incremental (and nonincremental) daily updates available by anonymous FTP. The International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration also exchanges new and updated records daily. Therefore, all sequences present in GenBank are also present in DDBJ and EMBL, as described in the introduction to this chapter. The three databases rely on a common data format for information described in the feature table documentation (see below). This represents the lingua franca for nucleotide sequence database annotations. Together, the nucleotide sequence databases have developed defined submission procedures (see Chapter 4), a series of guidelines for the content and format of all records. 

This example also illustrates the use of the database cross-reference (db xref). This controlled qualiher allows the databases to cross-reference the sequence in question to an external database (the first identifier) with an identifier used in that database. The list of allowed db xref databases is maintained by the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration. 

Nucleic acid sequence databases typically contain sequence data, which includes information at the level of the gene structures, introns and exons (for eukaryotics), cDNA (complementary DNA), RNA and transcription regulations. The important nucleic acid sequence data repositories as the primary resources known as International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC) are ... 

INSDC International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration... 

The partners of the International Nucleotide Sequence Databases (INSD), namely GenBank, EMBL, and DDBJ, share their nucleic acid... 

The nucleotide sequences can be retrieved from one of the three IC (International Collaboration) nucleotide sequence repositories/databases GenBank, EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database, and DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ). The retrieval can be conducted via accession numbers or keywords. Keynet (http // www.ba.cnr.it/keynet.html) is a tree browsing database of keywords extracted from... 

EMBL—the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (Heidelberg) Nucleotide Sequence Database (also known as EMBL-Bank). The database is produced in an international collaboration with GenBank (USA) and the DNA Database of Japan (DDBJ). The EMBL nucleotide sequence database is part of the Protein and Nucleotide Database Group (PANDA). 

Databases are produced by national and international research centers, by chemical companies and by individual researchers. They are available on magnetic tape and on CD-ROM. Also many databases are available from file servers located at various sites around the world, which can be accessed by electronic mail requests. The present trend, however, is for databases to become accessible via the net . Networked centralized major resources are clearly the answer to the problem posed by the exponential increase in the size of databases, and they also address the need for a more direct and interactive form of data retrieval. Networking also avoids the duplication of resources for example, hundreds of different online versions of nucleotide and protein sequences are now in existence. 

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