GenBank

GenBank is a public nucleotide sequence database maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), part of the United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. It provides an annotated collection of DNA sequences from a wide range of organisms and serves as a primary resource for genetic and genomic research. GenBank began in 1982 and is maintained through a collaboration among NCBI, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and other contributors. It operates as one component of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC) with EMBL-EBI and DDBJ to synchronize data across major public repositories.

Researchers submit sequence data to GenBank using tools such as BankIt or Sequin, and entries undergo basic curation before release. Each record includes the nucleotide sequence, organism information, bibliographic references, and annotations such as genes, coding sequences, regulatory features, and translations when available. GenBank data are provided in multiple formats, including the GenBank flat file and FASTA, and are accessible through NCBI's Entrez search and retrieval system as well as FTP.

The database is complemented by RefSeq, a curated, non-redundant subset, and by BLAST and other NCBI analysis tools to enable sequence similarity searches and annotation. GenBank is freely accessible to the public and widely used in research, education, and biotechnology for tasks ranging from basic sequence retrieval to large-scale genome annotation and comparative analyses.