The NCBI Assembly database now provides sequence and metadata for more than 1 million genome assemblies from over 85,000 different species.
Assembly crossed the 1 million genome assemblies milestone on Sunday, April 18, 2021 (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Assembly status and growth. More than 1 million assemblies are now searchable through the NCBI web site (top panel). The number of genome assemblies at NCBI has accelerated rapidly in the past decade.
Growth in the number of genome assemblies accelerated as new sequencing technologies dramatically reduced the cost of generating a genome assembly.
The explosion in the number of bacterial genome assemblies since 2018 has been driven by the application of sequencing and assembly to the surveillance of bacterial pathogens – the NCBI Pathogen Detection project has submitted more than half of all the genome assemblies in the Assembly database!