‘Country’ will transition to ‘Geographic Location’ effective June 2024

As announced earlier this year, we will begin to systematically gather ‘location of collection’ and ‘date and time of collection’ for sequence data submitted to GenBank and the Sequence Read Archive (SRA).

As part of this effort and to make location data more accurate and informative, we are also changing the way this information is represented on GenBank records, consistent with the relevant field in BioSample.

What’s changing?

In collaboration with our partners at the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC), we are changing the name of the GenBank qualifier “/country” to “/geo_loc_name” to better represent the diversity of sample collection location types. This change is being made to provide clarity to submitters and users as location types for sequence data may include geographic features, such as islands, oceans, or seas, in addition to country names. Learn more about INSDC geographic location qualifiers.

In cases where location data cannot be provided (e.g., a sample from a critically endangered species) or is not relevant (e.g., study of a model organism lab stock or an established cell line), submitters can declare an appropriate exemption.

When will these changes take effect?

The GenBank qualifier will change from “/country” to “/geo_loc_name” effective June 2024.

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Questions?

Please send any comments or questions to info@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

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