International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration

DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ), Mishima, Japan

 Sequence Retrieval

 DNA Sequence Submissions
European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL/EBI) Nucleotide Sequence Database, Hinxton, UK

 Sequence Retrieval

 DNA Sequence Submissions


 GenBank (National Center for Biotechnology Information) Bethesda, MD, USA

 Sequence Retrieval

 DNA Sequence Submissions

 		The collaboration that exists among the International Nucleotide Sequence Databases has led to many beneficial projects that promise to proliferate in the molecular biology community.

GenBank, along with partners DDBJ and EMBL, have launched www.insdc.org. This site presents the aims and policies of this long-established collaboration in gathering and publishing nucleotide sequence and annotation and links to the three partners' data submission and retreival tools.

Currently, the following projects are part of the collaborative effort among the three databases:

The Taxonomy Project

One of the goals of the collaborators is to use a unified taxonomy across all databases, largely one based on sequence information. The taxonomy project was set up as a tool for biologists worldwide, and also as a shared instrument for the collaborators. This is one of the important resources used for the maintenance of Genetic Codes, important for the correct translation of coding sequences.

The Feature Table

The Feature Table documentation represents the shared rules that allow the three databases to exchange data on a daily basis. The Feature Table represent the vocabulary that is used to describe the DNA sequence annotations as well as that of the protein sequence(s) they encode. The copy we present here is a mirror of the original document prepared by EBI.

This documentation is also available as a Microsoft Word or HTML files from EBI (in Europe) or NCBI (in the USA).

The db_xref Qualifier

A new qualifier was recently added to the Feature Table definition (/db_xref) that allows the nucleotide databases to explicitly reference specific sequences (protein sequences) or other identifiers within other databases.

The country Qualifier

A new qualifier was recently added to the Feature Table definition (/country) to indicate the country of origin of a DNA sample

Rev. March 31, 2006

Comments and questions to: info@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov