Table 1.

Public databases containing DNA, mRNA and protein sequences.

Acronym	Name	Hosted by	URL	Features	Reference
GenBank	GenBank	National Center for Biotechnology Information	http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/	An annotated collection of all publicly available DNA sequences (EST, gene and transcript sequences and unannotated single read sequences from genome sequencing projects)	Benson et al. (13)
EMBL- BANK	EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database	European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL)	http://www.ebi.ac.uk/embl/	A collection of DNA and RNA sequences submitted by researchers, genome sequencing projects, and patent applications. In addition to querying individual genes, whole genomes may be browsed	Kulikova (56)
DDBJ	DNA Data Bank of Japan	DNA Data Bank of Japan	http://www.ddbj.nig.ac.jp/	A collection of nucleotide sequences where sequences of recently sequenced genomes are particularly well represented	Miyazaki (57)
UCSC	UCSC Genome Bioinformatics site	Genome Bioinformatics Group at the University of California Santa Cruz	http://genome.ucsc.edu/	Contains reference sequences and working draft assemblies for a large collection of genomes. Source of sequences for genomes that have not been comprehensively sequenced and annotated (e.g., Neadertal)	Kent et al. (58)