NCBIs

National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is a division of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Founded in 1988, the NCBI was established to provide universal access to biomedical and genomic information through a single, integrated portal. Its mission is to improve human health by developing new tools and training resources for the analysis and dissemination of biological data.

NCBI hosts a suite of interconnected databases that are widely used by researchers, clinicians, and the public. GenBank, an open‑access sequence database, contains annotated nucleotide sequences from all sources. PubMed delivers indexed biomedical literature, while the PubMed Central archive offers free full‑text articles. Other specialized resources include RefSeq, a curated reference sequence database; dbSNP, a catalog of human genetic variation; and ClinVar, a repository of clinically relevant variants. The web‑based BLAST service provides rapid sequence alignment capabilities across these data sets.

Beyond data hosting, NCBI develops software and web services that support data submission, management, and analysis. It publishes the Entrez system, a search interface that integrates the diverse databases, and offers APIs for programmatic access. The organization also engages in training programs, workshops, and tutorials to help users navigate and utilize its resources effectively.

NCBI's open‑access policy and emphasis on interoperability have made it a cornerstone of bioinformatics infrastructure worldwide, supporting initiatives ranging from precision medicine to evolutionary biology.