Now Available! Updated Bacterial and Archaeal Reference Genomes Collection

Now Available! Updated Bacterial and Archaeal Reference Genomes Collection

An updated bacterial and archaeal reference genome collection is available! This collection of 18,343 genomes was built by selecting exactly one genome assembly for each species among the 312,000+ prokaryotic genomes in RefSeq, except for E. coli for which two assemblies were selected as reference.

The criteria for selecting the reference assembly for a given species include assembly contiguity and completeness and quality of the RefSeq annotation. 

What’s new?
  • 790 species were added to the collection
  • 199 species are represented by a better assembly (compared to the April 2023 release)
  • 70 species were removed because of changes in NCBI Taxonomy or uncertainty in their species assignment 

We updated the nucleotide BLAST RefSeq reference genomes database (fourth in the menu) as well as the database on the Microbial Nucleotide BLAST page to reflect these changes. You can also run BLAST searches against the proteins annotated on these reference genomes (second in the menu).

Stay up to date

Follow us on social @NCBI and join our mailing list to keep up to date with the bacterial and archaeal reference genomes collection and other NCBI news.     

We want to hear from you!

Please reach out to us if you have questions or would like to provide feedback.

3 thoughts on “Now Available! Updated Bacterial and Archaeal Reference Genomes Collection

Leave a Reply