GenBank and SRA Sequence Submission Brokers

Organizations that submit data to GenBank and SRA on behalf of their own users are known as Submission Brokers. The Submission Broker deposits properly formatted sequences and metadata at NLM-NCBI including information about the original data owner to ensure proper attribution.

Submission Brokers are vetted by NCBI to ensure that the submissions meet NCBI's basic requirements and pass quality assurance assessments. Consequently, submissions received from these brokers are generally of good quality and are in the desired, standardized format. As a result, submissions from brokers benefit NCBI by reducing the curation and communication aspects of processing submissions.

Data owners also benefit from depositing data through a Submission Broker if they are already interacting with that broker by using their specialized genomic workbench and analysis tools. The Submission Broker builds valid submission and transfers it to NCBI, eliminating the need for the data owner to manually transfer the data to NCBI.

Examples of Submission Brokers include:

• Barcode of Life Data System, University of Guelph (BOLD)
• NIH NIAID Bioinformatics and Computational Biosciences Branch's Metagenote
• DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI)
• HIV Sequence database, Los Alamos National Laboratory
• Geneious
• Illumina