National Center for Biotechnology Information

National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is a part of the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It 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 and is an important resource for bioinformatics tools and services. Major databases include GenBank for DNA sequences and PubMed, a bibliographic database for the biomedical literature. Other databases include the Protein Database, the Sequence Read Archive, and PubChem.

History

The NCBI was founded in 1988 to aid in the development and distribution of computational tools for understanding and interpreting genetic data. Its creation was part of a larger initiative by the United States Congress to promote research into the human genome.

Databases and Software

The NCBI provides a suite of computational tools, and maintains a number of databases for the biomedical and genomic research communities. These include:

• GenBank: The U.S. genetic sequence database, an annotated collection of all publicly available DNA sequences.
• PubMed: A bibliographic database for the biomedical literature.
• PubChem: A public database of small molecules and their biological activities.
• BLAST: An algorithm for comparing primary biological sequence information.
• Entrez: A federated search engine for biomedical research.

See Also

• Bioinformatics
• Genomics
• Biotechnology

External Links

• Official Website

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