Update on Future Plans for NCBI SRA and Trace Repositories

Recently, NCBI announced that due to budget constraints, it would be discontinuing its Sequence Read Archive (SRA) and Trace Archive repositories for high-throughput sequence data. However, NIH has since committed interim funding for SRA in its current form until October 1, 2011. In addition, NCBI has been working with staff from other NIH Institutes and NIH grantees to develop an approach to continue archiving a widely used subset of next generation sequencing data after October 1, 2011. We now plan to continue handling sequencing data associated with:

1. RNA-Seq, ChIP-Seq, and epigenomic data that are submitted to GEO
2. Genomic and Transcriptomic assemblies that are submitted to GenBank
3. 16S ribosomal RNA data associated with metagenomics that are submitted to GenBank

In addition, NCBI will continue to provide access to existing SRA and Trace Archive data for the foreseeable future. NCBI is also continuing to discuss with NIH Institutes approaches for handling other next-generation sequencing data associated with specific large-scale studies.

For further information about these repositories, contact NCBI's Help Desk.