The bacterial and archaeal representative genome collection has been updated! We selected a total of 14,912 of the 224,000 prokaryotic RefSeq assemblies to represent their respective species. The collection has grown by 8% since April 2021 and now includes Candidatus and endosymbiont species (Figure 1), which constitute 303 and 140 respectively of the 1,077 newly added species. In addition, 719 species are represented by a better assembly, and 70 species were removed because of changes in NCBI Taxonomy or uncertainty in their species assignment.
Figure 1. Graphical view of a portion of the RefSeq Representative assembly for the bedbug endosymbiont Candidatus Wolbachia massiliensis isolate PL13.
We made some improvements in the selection of representatives, most notably, assemblies with plasmids are now ranked higher than those without. We have updated the database on the Microbial Nucleotide BLAST page as well as the basic nucleotide BLAST RefSeq Representative Genome Database (second in the menu) to reflect these changes. Finally, remember that you can now run Blast searches against the proteins annotated on representative genomes (second in the menu). See more info here!