For nearly 20 years, the three leading public repositories for DNA and RNA sequence data have collaborated to provide access to the ever increasing amount of genetic data produced by institutions around the world. The three repositories have now reached a significant milestone by collecting and disseminating 100 gigabases of sequence data. For a frame of reference, one hundred billion bases is about equal to the number of nerve cells in a human brain and a bit less than the number of stars in the Milky Way.

These 100,000,000,000 bases, or "letters" of the genetic code, represent both individual genes and partial and complete genomes of over 165,000 organisms. While a single gene from organisms as diverse as humans, elephants, earthworms, fruitflies, apple trees, and bacteria can range from less than one hundred to over several thousand bases long, an organism's genome can be longer than one billion bases. The free access to this information allows scientists to study and compare the same data as their colleagues nearly anywhere in the world, and makes possible collaborative research that will lead ultimately to cures for diseases and improved health.

Thanks to their data exchange policy, the three members of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration: GenBank (Bethesda, Maryland USA), European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-Bank in Hinxton, UK), and the DNA Data Bank of Japan (Mishima, Japan) all reached this milestone together.

GenBank is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a part of the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. Submitters to GenBank currently contribute over 3 million new DNA sequences per month to the database. More information about GenBank may be found on the NCBI Web site at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

David Lipman, Director of the National Center for Biotech
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Contact: Robert Mehnert
publicinfo@nlm.nih.gov
301-496-6308
NIH/National Library of Medicine
22-Aug-2005

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