Download the updated bacterial and archaeal reference genome collection! This collection (18,941 genomes as of Jan 18, 2024) was built by selecting the “best” genome assembly for each species among the 330,000+ prokaryotic genomes in RefSeq (except for E. coli for which two assemblies were selected as reference). You can speed up your sequence searches by running them against these high-quality genomes instead of the entire nucleotide or protein database.
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?
- 638 species added to the collection
- 283 species represented by a better assembly (compared to the August 2023 release)
- 42 species 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 Database menu on the nucleotide BLAST form) as well as the database on the Microbial Nucleotide BLAST page with this collection. You can also run BLAST searches against the proteins annotated on these reference genomes through the RefSeq Select proteins database (second in the Database menu on the protein BLAST form).
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Questions?
Please reach out to us if you have questions or would like to provide feedback.