1. Background
  2. Data Collection Methods
  3. Data Quality Control
  4. Summary

GenBank Submit dropdown menu from website.

Data Acquisition

To provide specific examples of how data are collected and quality control procedures, two NCBI databases, GenBank and RefSeq, will be examined.

NCBI GenBank - Data repository

GenBank is built upon investigator-submitted data, high-throughput data from sequencing centers, and data from sequences submitted to ISDNC partner databases (European Nucleotide Archive formerly known as the EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database, and the DNA Data Bank of Japan) (Benson et al. 2005). Submission guidelines are available online and tools are provided to help submitters with formatting their data for GenBank.

  1. Submitters' Responsibilities
    1. Editorial control of the data: presubmission and after quality assurance review by GenBank staff.
    2. Provide annotations for submitted sequences.
    3. Format data with the help of GenBank web-based submission tools: BankIt, Sequin and tbl2asn.
  2. GenBank Staff Role
    1. Assign accession numbers for sequences.
    2. Perform a quality assurance review that checks for vector contamination, propoer translation of coding regions, correct taxonomy, and correct bibliographic citations, then return data to submitter for final approval.