Tag: Records

NCBI’s GI sequence identifiers will soon exceed 32-bit numbers. Are you and your software ready?

In 2016, NCBI announced that it was curtailing its display of its numeric ‘GI’ in popular sequence data formats such as FASTA and GenBank flatfiles. Due to the continued growth of GenBank, NCBI will soon begin assigning GIs exceeding the signed 32-bit threshold of 2,147,483,647 for those remaining sequence types that still receive these identifiers.

NCBI has updated products including Entrez system, GenBank (Nucleotide), BLAST™ and the C++ Toolkit to prepare for that moment by upgrading GI-related code and APIs to accept 64-bit integers. This change over is projected for late 2021. Stay tuned for additional communications from NCBI and take note of the following information if you think you may be impacted.

For a seamless transition, all organizations and developers using our products should review software for any remaining reliance on GIs and compatibility with these larger identifiers. Note that this update requires no changes to submission procedures or assignment of accessions. Continue reading “NCBI’s GI sequence identifiers will soon exceed 32-bit numbers. Are you and your software ready?” →

Converting GI Numbers to Accession.version

As you may have read in previous posts, NCBI is in the process of changing the way we handle GI numbers for sequence records.

In short, we are moving to a time when accession.version identifiers, rather than GI numbers, will be the primary identifiers for sequence records.

As part of this transition, an obvious question for any of you currently using GI numbers is how to convert a GI number to an accession.version, so that you can make appropriate updates. The good news is that it’s pretty easy if you have no more than a few thousand GIs to convert.

Continue reading “Converting GI Numbers to Accession.version” →

NCBI is Phasing Out Sequence GIs – Here’s What You Need to Know

You may have heard that NCBI is changing the way we handle GI numbers for sequence records in September 2016. Well, you heard right! Here’s the announcement, in case you missed it.

There are a number of issues raised by these changes, but we’re going to answer two questions in this post:

What pieces of your code will break in September?
Are GI numbers gone for good?

Continue reading “NCBI is Phasing Out Sequence GIs – Here’s What You Need to Know” →