NCBI

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is a division of the United States National Library of Medicine, within the National Institutes of Health. It provides centralized access to biomedical and genomic information and develops tools for computational biology. NCBI was established in 1988 to integrate data from diverse sources and to support research, education, and clinical practice.

NCBI maintains a broad collection of databases and resources that span literature, sequences, genes, proteins, and structures. Core resources include GenBank, a public nucleotide sequence database; RefSeq, a curated reference sequence collection; PubMed, a bibliographic database of biomedical literature; and PubMed Central, an open-access full-text archive. The Entrez search system enables integrated queries across these and other databases, supporting cross-database discovery. Additional resources cover genes, proteins, three-dimensional structures, genetic variation, and functional genomics, such as Gene, Protein, Structure, dbSNP, ClinVar, GEO, and the Sequence Read Archive (SRA).

NCBI also offers a suite of free bioinformatics tools and software. Notable examples include BLAST for sequence similarity searching, Primer-BLAST for primer design, ORF Finder for open reading frame identification, and various utilities for data retrieval and analysis via the E-utilities API. These resources are widely used for data mining, sequence analysis, and the development of computational pipelines.

Access to NCBI resources is free through the website ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Users can search, retrieve, and download data, submit sequence data to GenBank, and integrate NCBI resources into research workflows. NCBI plays a central role in bioinformatics, data sharing, and the global infrastructure for biomedical information.