SUBMITTING DNA SEQUENCES TO THE DATABASES

The submission process is governed by an international, collaborative agreement. Sequences submitted to any one of the three databases participating in this collaboration will appear in the other two databases within a few days of their release to the public. Sequence records are then distributed worldwide by various user groups and centers, including those that reformat the records for use within their own suites of programs and databases. Thus, by submitting a sequence to only one of the three major databases, researchers can quickly disseminate their sequence data and avoid the possibility that redimdant records will be archived. 

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The nucleotide sequence databases can be screened by a number of sequence similarity tools and some protein identification applications, such as SEQUEST [58]. As it is difficult to predict coding sequences from raw genomic data, and in some cases the authors have not submitted the information to the database, the tools propose protein hits from translated raw DNA sequences. 

These databases contain genomes, genes, ESTs, variations, introns, exons - all pieces of DNA which have been sequenced and submitted by scientists around the world to the maintainers of the databases. 

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