HENRY

What can you say, but just.. wow:

From its inception, GenBank has doubled in size about every 18 months. The traditional GenBank divisions contain over 80 billion nucleotide bases from more than 76 million individual sequences, with 15 million new sequences added in the past year. Contributions from Whole Genome Shotgun (WGS) projects supplement the data in the traditional divisions to bring the total beyond 190 billion bases. Complete genomes (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Genomes/index.html) continue to represent a rapidly growing segment of the database, with some 200 of more than 570 complete microbial genomes in GenBank deposited over the past year. The number of eukaryote genomes for which coverage and assembly are significant continues to increase as well, with over 190 assemblies now available, including that of the reference human genome.

From: Benson et al, 2008.

Posted on April 5th, 2008 by Simon Greenhill