Announcing GenBank Release 253.0

Announcing GenBank Release 253.0

GenBank release 253.0 (12/20/2022) is now available on the NCBI FTP site. This release has 21.38 trillion bases and 3.25 billion records. The current release has 241,015,745 traditional records containing 1,635,594,138,493 base pairs of sequence data. There are also 2,241,439,349 WGS records containing 19,086,596,616,569 base pairs of sequence data, 649,918,843 bulk-oriented TSA records containing 611,850,391,049 base pairs of sequence data, and 115,552,377 bulk-oriented TLS records containing 44,009,657,455 base pairs of sequence data. 

Growth between releases

During the 62 days between the close dates for GenBank Releases 252.0 and 253.0, the traditional portion of GenBank grew by 72,630,771,642 base pairs and by 476,463 sequence records. We updated 252,865 records during that same period. We added and/or updated an average of 11,763 traditional records per day!

Between releases 252.0 and 253.0, the WGS component of GenBank grew by 854,635,807,741 base pairs and by 73,539,043 sequence records. The TSA component of GenBank grew by 100,373,603,092 base pairs and by 75,898,763 sequence records. The TLS component of GenBank grew by 149,144,706 base pairs and by 429,071 sequence records.

The total number of sequence data files increased by 237 with this release. The divisions are as follows:

  • BCT: 26 new files, now a total of 883
  • ENV: 1 new file, now a total of 76
  • INV: 133 new files, now a total of 1098
  • MAM: 9 new files, now a total of 150
  • PLN: 24 new files, now a total of 1037
  • ROD: 9 new files, now a total of 223
  • VRL: 23 new files, now a total of 836
  • VRT: 12 new files, now a total of 332

Additional Information

For downloading purposes, please keep in mind that the uncompressed GenBank release 253.0 sequence data flat files require roughly 2,918 GB. The ASN.1 data files require approximately 1,467 GB.

For more information about GenBank release 253.0, see the release notes, as well as the README files in the GenBank and ASN.1 (ncbi-asn1) directories on FTP.

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