Biotechnology and Bioinformatics (1+1)

10.1.2 NCBI 

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is part of the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), a branch of the National Institutes of Health.

The NCBI is located in Bethesda, Maryland.

The NCBI houses genome sequencing data in GenBank and an index of biomedical research articles in PubMed Central and PubMed, as well as other information relevant to biotechnology.

All these databases are available online through the Entrez search engine. NCBI is directed by David Lipman, one of the original authors of the BLAST sequence alignment program and a widely respected figure in Bioinformatics.

The NCBI has had responsibility for making available the GenBank DNA sequence database since 1992.

GenBank coordinates with individual laboratories and other sequence databases such as those of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and the DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ).

Since 1992, NCBI has grown to provide other databases in addition to GenBank. NCBI provides

• Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man, the Molecular Modeling Database (3D protein structures),
• dbSNP a database of single-nucleotide polymorphisms,
•  the Unique Human Gene Sequence Collection, a Gene Map of the human genome, a Taxonomy Browser, and
•  coordinates with the National Cancer Institute to provide the Cancer Genome Anatomy Project.
• The NCBI assigns a unique identifier (Taxonomy ID number) to each species of organism.

The NCBI has software tools that are available by WWW browsing or by FTP. For example, BLAST is a sequence similarity searching program. BLAST can do sequence comparisons against the GenBank DNA database in less than 15 seconds.