BioProject and BioSample databases at NCBI: facilitating capture and organization of metadata.

As the volume and complexity of data sets archived at NCBI grow rapidly, so does the need to gather and organize the associated metadata. Although metadata has been collected for some archival databases, previously, there was no centralized approach at NCBI for collecting this information and using it across databases. The BioProject database was recently established to facilitate organization and classification of project data submitted to NCBI, EBI and DDBJ databases.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information's Protein Clusters Database.

Rapid increases in DNA sequencing capabilities have led to a vast increase in the data generated from prokaryotic genomic studies, which has been a boon to scientists studying micro-organism evolution and to those who wish to understand the biological underpinnings of microbial systems. The NCBI Protein Clusters Database (ProtClustDB) has been created to efficiently maintain and keep the deluge of data up to date. ProtClustDB contains both curated and uncurated clusters of proteins grouped by sequence similarity.

Plant genome resources at the national center for biotechnology information.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) integrates data from more than 20 biological databases through a flexible search and retrieval system called Entrez. A core Entrez database, Entrez Nucleotide, includes GenBank and is tightly linked to the NCBI Taxonomy database, the Entrez Protein database, and the scientific literature in PubMed. A suite of more specialized databases for genomes, genes, gene families, gene expression, gene variation, and protein domains dovetails with the core databases to make Entrez a powerful system for genomic research.

Genomic BLAST: custom-defined virtual databases for complete and unfinished genomes.

BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) searches against DNA and protein sequence databases have become an indispensable tool for biomedical research. The proliferation of the genome sequencing projects is steadily increasing the fraction of genome-derived sequences in the public databases and their importance as a public resource. We report here the availability of Genomic BLAST, a novel graphical tool for simplifying BLAST searches against complete and unfinished genome sequences.