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.

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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:

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

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