GenBank release 260.0 (4/19/2024) is now available on the NCBI FTP site. This release has 31.18 trillion bases and 4.46 billion records.
The current release has:
- 250,803,006 traditional records containing 3,213,818,003,787 base pairs of sequence data
- 3,333,621,823 WGS records containing 27,225,116,587,937 base pairs of sequence data
- 741,066,498 bulk-oriented TSA records containing 689,648,317,082 base pairs of sequence data
- 135,115,766 bulk-oriented TLS records containing 53,492,243,256 base pairs of sequence data
What’s new?
During the 93 days between the close dates for GenBank releases 259.0 and 260.0, the traditional portion of GenBank grew by 643,106,415,743 base pairs and by 1,742,570 sequence records. We updated 113,299 records during that same period. We added and/or updated an average of 19,955 traditional records per day!
Between releases 259.0 and 260.0, the WGS component of GenBank grew by 2,573,536,123,602 base pairs and by 470,393,271 sequence records. The TSA component of GenBank grew by 20,841,207,756 base pairs and by 25,263,375 sequence records. The TLS component of GenBank grew by 1,923,886,278 base pairs and by 2,760,634 sequence records.
The total number of sequence data files increased by 1,560 with this release. The divisions are as follows:
- BCT: 132 new files, now a total of 1,201
- CON: 2 new files, now a total of 240
- INV: 462 new files, now a total of 2,561
- MAM: 76 new files, now a total of 349
- PAT: 6 new files, now a total of 269
- PLN: 745 new files, now a total of 2,458
- PRI: 10 new files, now a total of 87
- ROD: 29 new files, now a total of 343
- VRL: 32 new files, now a total of 1,095
- VRT: 66 new files, now a total of 575
Note: There was no GenBank release in February, so the growth statistics are higher than normal.
Upcoming changes
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.” As previously announced, this change (effective June 2024) will better represent the diversity of sample collection location types.
GenBank will also have new allowed values for the “/collection_date” qualifier, effective December 2024.
Additional information
For downloading purposes, please keep in mind that the uncompressed GenBank release 260.0 sequence data flat files require roughly 5,021 GB. The ASN.1 data files require approximately 2,041 GB.
For more information about GenBank release 260.0, 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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Questions?
Please send any comments or questions to info@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.