Featured Article
General Research Use collection streamlines access to patient-level data in dbGaP
In response to many requests from dbGaP users to simplify and streamline the data access request process while respecting patient consent, dbGaP staff have identified “General Research Use” individuals from different studies and created a collection that allows users to access data on these individuals through a single access request.
Read more...April 21st webinar: Rebroadcast of "NCBI and the NIH Public Access Policy: PubMed Central Submissions, My NCBI, My Bibliography and SciENcv"
On Tuesday, April 21, NCBI will have an encore presentation of the March 5th webinar for NIH grant holders on My NCBI, My Bibliography and SciENcv. This webinar will include the same material as the March 5th webinar; the recording of the original presentation is available on YouTube.
April 15th webinar: "The NCBI Minute: Finding and Getting the Data You Want from NCBI in Less than Three Minutes - Introducing BioProject'
Next Wednesday, April 15th, NCBI staff will show you how to use the BioProject database to quickly find data. When looking for research data using fairly broad search terms like "tuberculosis" or "mouse", BioProject is a great place to start. In this brief presentation, you will learn how to search for studies and quickly identify related PubMed-listed publications and experimental data, such as RNA-seq datasets in the GEO database.
NIH issued statement on use of dbGaP in the Cloud
On Monday, the National Institutes of Health announced that it is now allowing investigators to request permission to transfer controlled-access genomic and associated phenotypic data obtained from NIH-designated data repositories, like dbGaP, under the auspices of the NIH Genomic Data Sharing (GDS) policy to public or private cloud systems for data storage and analysis.
Updated human and mouse genome annotations now available
Updated annotations for the human and mouse RefSeq genomes produced by the Eukaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline are now available. New known RefSeq transcripts (NM_ and NR_ accessions) and non-transcribed pseudogenes (NG_ accessions) were used for these annotations. The number of model RefSeq predictions (XM_ and XR_ accessions) also increased through the use of additional RNA-Seq datasets, especially for human where model RefSeq annotated on GRCh38.p2 contain 41% more exonic bases (31 MBp) than the known RefSeq.
April 8th webinar: "The NCBI Minute: Introducing MOLE-BLAST"
On April 8th, NCBI will present a five-minute webinar introducing MOLE-BLAST, a tool for clustering targeted sequences, like those from 16s rRNA, with database sequences and providing taxonomic context. MOLE-BLAST can quickly establish taxonomy for sequences from uncultured or environmental sequences. To register, click here.
April 1st webinar: "A Practical Guide to Using NCBI BLAST on the Web"
Next Wednesday, April 1st, NCBI will present a webinar on the NCBI BLAST service. The webinar will highlight important features and demonstrate the practical aspects of using NCBI BLAST, the most popular sequence similarity service in the world. To register, click here.