The NCBI Minute: quick introductions to NCBI resources

For over two years, NCBI has presented webinars on a wide range of topics to a growing audience. More recently, we began offering shorter webinars in a series called The NCBI Minute.

These presentations introduce a new NCBI tool or resource or provide quick tips for using a popular resource in 5-10 minutes.

screenshot of popular NCBI Minute presentations on YouTube
Figure 1. Examples of popular NCBI Minute presentations; SmartBLAST Introduction presented September 2 (YouTube), and Connecting with PubMed Commons presented May 2 (YouTube).

Each NCBI Minute is recorded and posted on our YouTube channel in the NCBI Minute playlist. Two of our most popular NCBI Minute presentations (Figure 1) are the introduction to the new SmartBLAST service, first described on NCBI Insights in July, and Connecting with PubMed Commons, our public commenting service for PubMed articles described in several NCBI Insights posts.

Missed a presentation? No problem!

If you missed any of The NCBI Minute, there are two ways you can catch up:


1. The Archived Webinars & Courses tab on the NCBI Courses & Webinars page.

All previous NCBI Minute webinars are listed there, along with all materials presented, including slides and demonstrations. These materials can also be downloaded from the FTP site.

Archived Courses & Webinars tab on the Webinars & Courses page
Figure 2. Archived Webinars & Courses tab shows all past webinars and a link to download the materials used.

2. The official NCBI YouTube channel

As stated above, we upload all of our webinars to YouTube; the NCBI Minute has its own playlist.

Watching The NCBI Minute live

We list all upcoming webinars on the NCBI Courses & Webinars page, along with links to register for them. We also announce these webinars on our various social media channels, so you’ll see those posts if you follow us on any of these official accounts:

Upcoming NCBI Minute webinars

Date Day & Time Title & Description Registration link
December 16, 2015 Wed, 12:00-12:15 pm NCBI Minute: New Advanced Search in dbGaP Provides Easy Access to Relevant Data

The new advanced search interface to dbGaP makes finding relevant data much easier.

In this webinar you will learn how to access the new faceted search and to quickly find human subject data by study, variables, datasets, documents, genotypes.

Register here
Dec 17, 2015 Thu, 1:00-2:00 pm Accessing the 1000 Genomes Project Data at the NCBI

The 1000 Genomes Project data now include small-scale and structural variant calls from 2,504 individuals representing 26 human populations.

In this webinar you will see how to access 1000 Genomes data through the SRA, dbVar, SNP and BioProject resources, as well as through tracks on annotated human sequences in the Graphical sequence viewer and the Variation Viewer.

Most important you will learn how to display, search, and download individual and genotype level data through the dedicated 1000 Genomes Browser that allows searching by chromosomal position, gene names and other genome markers.

Register here
Jan 7, 2016 Thu, 12:00-12:15 pm NCBI Minute: New track options for getting the most out of NCBI Graphical Viewers

New track options in the NCBI graphical viewers and genome browsers provide powerful features including seven different NCBI Recommended Track Sets, the ability to create, save and share custom track sets as a collection in My NCBI.

You will learn how to use these new features as well see how to search and quickly find relevant tracks and to upload your own custom data.

This webinar will help you get the most out of the NCBI Graphical Sequence Viewer, Variation Viewer and other NCBI graphical browsers.

Register here

If you have a topic or NCBI resource you’d like to see us explore in The NCBI Minute or in a longer webinar, please write to webinars@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. We welcome your suggestions!

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