Skip to main content
. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2022 Aug 25.
Published in final edited form as: Trends Microbiol. 2021 Feb 1;29(7):582–592. doi: 10.1016/j.tim.2021.01.005

Figure 1. Exponential growth of the prokaryote genome database.

Figure 1.

Number of genome assemblies at different assembly levels (ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/genomes/ASSEMBLY_REPORTS/) in the GenBank section of the NCBI Assembly database. The data points correspond to the end of the respective year; the X-axis starts with 1995, the year when the first two complete genomes were published.

Complete genome: all chromosomes are fully assembled with gaps not exceeding 10 ambiguous bases.

Chromosome: all chromosomes are fully assembled, but possibly containing gaps or unlocalized scaffolds.

Scaffold: sequence contigs are connected across gaps, but not placed on the chromosomes.

Contig: only unconnected contigs are available.