ena

ENA, the European Nucleotide Archive, is a publicly accessible nucleotide sequence database operated by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Hinxton, UK. It stores a wide range of nucleotide sequence data, including raw sequencing reads, assembled genomes, and functional annotations, and serves as a long-term archive for the global research community. ENA is part of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC), together with GenBank at NCBI in the United States and the DNA Data Bank of Japan, and ENA records are synchronized with these partners to ensure data exchange and wide accessibility.

Data submission to ENA is facilitated by tools such as Webin, and submissions are linked to sample, study, and project metadata. Supported data types include FASTQ and FASTA sequence data, along with alignments and variants in formats such as BAM/CRAM and VCF, plus related metadata and annotations. Accession numbers are assigned to records to enable citation and cross-reference.

Access to ENA data is free and open to the public. The ENA Browser and a RESTful API plus FTP access provide programmatic and manual retrieval, and the database adheres to INSDC data licensing and reuse policies to support research and data integration.

For researchers, ENA is a widely used resource in genomics, transcriptomics, metagenomics, and comparative studies, offering data deposition, search, and retrieval across a broad range of organisms and environmental samples.

Other uses of the acronym ENA include the Emergency Nurses Association, a professional nursing organization in the United States, among other entities depending on context.