Genomics & More: National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)
In 1986, the NLM Board of Regents recognized that molecular biology was revolutionizing science and creating unique informational demands. They called for a center to be established within NLM for the analysis and distribution of genomic data and for the development of computational tools for molecular biologists. NLM Director Donald A.B. Lindberg gave the Board's recommendation his highest priority, and the late Congressman Claude Pepper championed the legislation to create the center in November, 1988, known as the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Shortly after, Dr. David Lipman was appointed as director, to manage this national resource for molecular biology information.
- Since its inception, NCBI has been the leading international source of molecular biology with over 40 interlinked databases of biomedical literature and molecular and genomic information, for the medical and scientific communities as well as the general public. Each day, nearly 2 million users access NCBI's Web site.
- NCBI's core scientific literature database is PubMed, the most frequently consulted scientific medical resource in the world. The site provides abstracts and citations for 20 million articles drawn from over 5,000 currently indexed biomedical journals. PubMed links to full-text versions of the articles available from journal Web sites and from PubMed Central (PMC).
- PubMed Central (PMC) is an online archive of over 2 million free, full-text articles. The PMC database is also the data repository of the NIH Public Access policy, whereby the public as well as researchers can read the publications resulting from NIH-funded research.
- The first national molecular database, GenBank, began in 1982 at the Los Alamos National Laboratory as an NIH database of DNA sequences. In 1992, the coordination of nucleotide sequence submissions and hosting of the GenBank database was moved to the NCBI.
- NCBI's Nucleotidedatabase includes all publicly available nucleotide sequences (over 180 million from more than 390,000 different species). In order to assist users to more effectively search the massive volumes of data in its sequence databases, NCBI developed new bioinformatics pipelines to produce synthesized resources.
- RefSeq provides a stable, well-annotated reference for DNA, RNA and protein sequences for gene identification and characterization, expression studies, and comparative analysis.
- Gene is a database integrating comprehensive information about genes with links to related literature, molecular, genomic and biochemical data.
- The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) finds regions of local similarity between sequences. The program compares nucleotide or protein sequences to sequence databases and calculates the statistical significance of matches. BLAST can be used to infer functional and evolutionary relationships between sequences as well as help identify members of gene families.
- Map Viewer allows you to view and search an organism's complete genome, display chromosome maps, and zoom into progressively greater levels of detail, down to the sequence data for a region of interest.
- The Gene Expression Omnibus DataSet cluster analysis program is a visualization tool for displaying cluster heat maps that are one of the most powerful methods to mine and visualize high-dimensional data.
- Cn3D is a helper application for your web browser that allows you to view three-dimensional structures from NCBI's Entrez retrieval service.
- The dbGaP database contains genotype data with phenotype (observable characteristics) information from NIH Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS).
- Epigenomics is a database cataloging genomic modifications that influence gene expression.
- The Sequence Read Archive (SRA) archives the data from next-generation sequencing projects, including the international 1000 Genomes Project. SRA contains more than 50 trillion bases of sequence data.
- PubChem, a valuable resource for drug development, is one of the largest collections of structural compounds and their biological activities, with data on over 20 million small molecules.
- NCBI celebrated its 20th anniversary on February 6, 2009 with a program of distinguished speakers:
