GenBank, RefSeq, TPA, and UniProt

Abstract

At a recent workshop on microbial genomes held at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and attended by bacterial annotation groups, sequencing centers, and members of ASM, some attendees expressed confusion about the differences between several nucleotide and protein databases and requested that NCBI summarize these resources and their differences. NCBI has prepared a document in response. While there was some input from the European Bioinformatics Institute on UniProt and Swiss-Prot, the document represents an NCBI perspective. The document, “GenBank, RefSeq, TPA and UniProt: What's in a Name?,” is available through the online edition of this issue.