GenBank

Definition

GenBank is a comprehensive public database of nucleotide sequences and supporting bibliographic and biological annotation. It is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).

5 Must Know Facts For Your Next Test

1. GenBank contains over 200 million sequences, making it one of the largest repositories of genetic information.
2. Sequences in GenBank are submitted from laboratories worldwide and are freely accessible to researchers.
3. Each sequence entry in GenBank includes information such as the source organism, gene function, and associated literature references.
4. The database supports various formats for sequence data submission, including FASTA and ASN.1.
5. GenBank is linked to other NCBI resources like BLAST, which allows users to find regions of similarity between sequences.

Review Questions

• What kind of data can be found in GenBank?
• How is GenBank useful for microbiologists studying DNA, RNA, or proteins?
• What types of annotations accompany each sequence entry in GenBank?

Related terms

NCBI: National Center for Biotechnology Information; it maintains several biomedical databases including GenBank.

FASTA format: A text-based format for representing nucleotide or peptide sequences using single-letter codes.

BLAST: Basic Local Alignment Search Tool; a program that finds regions of similarity between biological sequences.