National centre of biotechnology

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is part of the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), a branch of the National Institutes of Health. The NCBI is located in Bethesda, Maryland and was founded in 1988 through legislation sponsored by Senator Claude Pepper.

The NCBI houses a series of databases relevant to biotechnology and biomedicine. Major databases include GenBank for DNA sequences and PubMed, a bibliographic database for the biomedical literature. All these databases are available online through the Entrez search engine.

NCBI is directed by David Lipman, one of the original authors of the BLAST sequence alignment program and a widely respected figure in bioinformatics.

The NCBI has had responsibility for making available the GenBank DNA sequence database since 1992. GenBank coordinates with individual laboratories and other sequence databases such as those of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and the DNA Data Bank of Japan .

Since 1992, NCBI has grown to provide other databases in addition to GenBank. NCBI provides Gene, Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man, the Molecular Modeling Database (3D protein structures), dbSNP (a database of single-nucleotide polymorphisms), the Reference Sequence Collection, a map of the human genome, and a taxonomy browser, and coordinates with the National Cancer Institute to provide the Cancer Genome Anatomy Project. The NCBI assigns a unique identifier (taxonomy ID number) to each species of organism.

The NCBI has software tools that are available by WWW browsing or by FTP. For example, BLAST is a sequence similarity searching program. BLAST can do sequence comparisons against the GenBank DNA database in less than 15 seconds.

III. Answer the questions:

1. What is NCBI?

2. Where is NCBI located?

3. When was NCBI founded?

4. Who directs NCBI?

5. What is GenBank?

6. What does NCBI provide?

7. What is BLAST?

8. What is taxonomy ID number?

IV. Is the sentence true or false?

1. The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is part of the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM).___________________

2. All these databases are not available online through the Entrez search engine.__________________

3. GenBank coordinates with general laboratories and other sequence databases such as those of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and the DNA Data Bank of Japan .________________________

4. Since 1992, NCBI has grown to provide other databases in addition to GenBank.________________________

5. The NCBI has had responsibility for making available the GenBank DNA sequence database since 1998.________________________________

6. The NCBI assigns a unique identifier (taxonomy ID number) to each species of organism. ________________________________

7. BLAST is a sequence similarity gene program. _________________________

8. BLAST can do sequence comparisons against the GenBank DNA database in less than 15 minutes. ______________________________

9. The NCBI has software tools that are available by WWW browsing or by FTP. ____________________________________

10. The NCBI houses a series of databases relevant to biotechnology and biomedicine._____________________________________