Priorities for nucleotide trace, sequence and annotation data capture at the Ensembl Trace Archive and the EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database

Abstract

The Ensembl Trace Archive (http://trace.ensembl.org/) and the EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/embl/), known together as the European Nucleotide Archive, continue to see growth in data volume and diversity. Selected major developments of 2007 are presented briefly, along with data submission and retrieval information. In the face of increasing requirements for nucleotide trace, sequence and annotation data archiving, data capture priority decisions have been taken at the European Nucleotide Archive. Priorities are discussed in terms of how reliably information can be captured, the long-term benefits of its capture and the ease with which it can be captured.

Figure 1.

EMBL submission portal. The screenshot shows the submission portal top page, where submission options are presented to the user.

Figure 2.

Input pipelines into ENA. Data input pipelines into ENA are shown; the left-hand side of the diagram represents the work of the data generating group and the right-hand side the work of ENA; validation refers to the semantic content of data transferred, particularly the biological content, and loading refers to syntactic checking of data and upload into the appropriate database.