Discontinuation of the GenBank Cumulative Updates

As announced in the Fall/Winter 2002 NCBI Newsletter and in the October and December 2002 GenBank release notes, the GenBank Cumulative Update (GBCU) files listed below are no longer supported:

gbcu.aso.gz
gbcu.fsa.gz
gbcu.qscore.gz
gbcu.flat.gz
gbcu.gnp.gz
gbcu.fsa.gz

These files were formerly available in the GenBank “daily” directory.

As the size of the GBCU has grown to nearly 20% of the total database size, the GBCU files have become increasingly difficult to download and use. The smaller incremental GbUpdate files, which are more practical to download and easier to process and are still found at:

To facilitate the use of the incremental update files, NCBI furnishes a script for combining the incremental update files into a non-redundant cumulative update file. The script, called “build_gbff_cu.pl”, can be downloaded by FTP at:

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