The international nucleotide sequence database collaboration

Abstract

For more than 30 years, the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC; http://www.insdc.org/) has been committed to capturing, preserving and providing access to comprehensive public domain nucleotide sequence and associated metadata which enables discovery in biomedicine, biodiversity and biological sciences. Since 1987, the DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) at the National Institute for Genetics in Mishima, Japan; the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Hinxton, UK; and GenBank at National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, USA have worked collaboratively to enable access to nucleotide sequence data in standardized formats for the worldwide scientific community. In this article, we reiterate the principles of the INSDC collaboration and briefly summarize the trends of the archival content.

Figure 1.

(A) Cumulative 10-Year INSDC Growth of Assembled/Annotated Data: Sequence bases (solid) and sequence records (dashed). (B) Cumulative 10-Year INSDC Growth of SRA Data: Sequence bases (solid) and single-copy data storage (dashed).

Figure 2.

Cumulative 10-Year INSDC Growth of Formal Taxonomic Names (all ranks). Names are broken down into Fungi, metazoan eukaryotes (Metazoa), green plants (Viridiplantae) and prokaryotes (Archaea combined with Bacteria). For simplicity, non-metazoan eukaryotic groups and viruses are excluded.