Featured Article
Exploring next-gen sequencing experiments with SRA-BLAST
NCBI’s SRA-BLAST has two new features that substantially improve its ability to explore the myriad of next-gen sequencing studies available from NCBI’s Sequence Read Archive (SRA).
Read more...NCBI Insights blog post: Creating custom BLAST databases
The latest Quick Tip blog focuses on creating custom BLAST databases, which is an easy way to speed up BLAST analysis. The blog post takes you through the process, from selecting the appropriate parent database to manipulating the filters and Entrez Query.
SRA milestone: Over 2 petabases of sequence data
The Short Read Archive (SRA) now contains more than 2 petabases of high-throughput sequence data. One petabase of data is open access, while the rest are sequences from 40,000 individuals who have participated in human clinical studies catalogued in dbGaP.
Planned change in bacterial strain-level information management
Please be aware that there is an upcoming change (January 2014) in how NCBI manages organism strain information. Due to significant increases in the volume of strain-specific sequencing, we are changing our management of strain information.
NCBI Insights blog post: Saved Searches and E-mail Alerts
As part of the My NCBI service, PubMed and other Entrez databases allow users to save searches and then receive regular e-mail alerts about new records retrieved by that search. Please see the new NCBI Insights blog post for details about setting up these searches and alerts.
RefSeq release 62 now available
The complete RefSeq release 62 is now available with nearly 50 million records describing more than 36,036,343 proteins and 5,178,509 transcripts from 31,646 different organisms. More details about RefSeq release 62 are in the release statistics and the release notes.
NCBI's Eukaryotic Annotation Pipeline has now annotated the genomes for 100 different organisms!
NCBI began annotating eukaryotic genomes in 2000. We have now completed the genome annotation for 100 different organisms, including 50 mammals, 25 other vertebrates, 17 invertebrates and 8 plants. Among these 100 organisms, 47 were annotated for the first time in 2013. The lucky 100th organism is the Chinese alligator (Alligator sinensis).
NCBI's 25th Anniversary and The Jim Gray eScience Award
November 2013 marks 25 years since the founding of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).
In honor of NCBI’s 25th anniversary, United States Senator Ben Cardin read a statement into the Congressional Record recognizing years of service in providing access to biomedical and genomic information to enhance the world’s science and health.
In addition, on November 1st, an awards and recognition program was held to commemorate this occasion. At this event, Tony Hey, Ph.D., Vice President of Microsoft Research, presented NCBI Director David Lipman, M.D., with the Jim Gray eScience Award which recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of data-intensive computing in the pursuit of open, supportive, and collaborative research models.
New SNP data available for several organisms!
New SNP data (build 139) is now available on the web and in FTP files for several organisms, including gorilla, horse, dog, sheep, rabbit, opossum, platypus, wild turkey, zebra finch, tomato, grape and aspergillus.
Update on PubMed Commons' comments in the early pilot phase
PubMed Commons is a new system that enables researchers to share their opinions about scientific publications indexed in the PubMed database. Participation in PubMed Commons requires users with My NCBI accounts to join before they can view or add comments.
Human CCDS release 14 is now available in the Gene database
The Consensus Coding Sequence (CCDS) update for Homo sapiens annotation release 105 was released this week. The new CCDS data is available in the CCDS web site and FTP site. In addition, this update is now reflected in relevent Gene database records.