GenBank(R) is a comprehensive database of publicly available DNA
sequences for more than 205,000 named organisms and for more than
60,000 within the embryophyta, obtained through submissions from
individual laboratories and batch submissions from large-scale
sequencing projects. Daily data exchange with the European Molecular
Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Europe and the DNA Data Bank of Japan
ensures worldwide coverage. GenBank is accessible through the National
Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) retrieval system, Entrez,
which integrates data from the major DNA and protein sequence databases
with taxonomy, genome, mapping, protein structure, and domain
information and the biomedical journal literature through PubMed. BLAST
provides sequence similarity searches of GenBank and other sequence
databases. Complete bimonthly releases and daily updates of the GenBank
database are available through FTP. GenBank usage scenarios ranging from
local analyses of the data available through FTP to online analyses
supported by the NCBI Web-based tools are discussed.