As the global health emergency around the Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, formerly 2019-nCoV) continues, we continue to play a key role in providing the biomedical community free and easy access to genome sequences from the coronavirus. You can quickly access these data through the NCBI search (Figure 1).Figure 1.  NCBI search results for the term “SARS-COV-2” showing the schematic map of the viral assembly and annotation and buttons that link to the data in the NCBI Virus resource, a specialized BLAST page that searches Betacoronavirus sequences, and the reference assembly download. The bottom panel provides links to the CDC website for COVID-19 information and a link to GenBank®/SRA sequence data.

NCBI teams at GenBank®, the Sequence Read Archive (SRA), NCBI Virus, and BLAST continue to rapidly process and release data associated with this outbreak as it becomes available.  We also have a dedicated BLAST search page for Betacoronavirus sequences that includes the outbreak data. As always, we welcome new sequence data submissions.

Open access data such as that provided by the National Library of Medicine through NCBI is vital to the research community to support the massive collaborative effort required to understand this novel viral pathogen and inform public health interventions.

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