Comparative Genome Analyses

The extraordinary achievements of genome-based biology in recent years can be explained for the most part by the technological progress in DNA sequencing as well as developments in hardware and software that have made it possible to store and annotate huge amounts of data. The total number of all freely accessible nucleotides in GenBank [genbank], the DNA sequence database at the NCBI, is 218 billion bases within 196 million DNA sequences (Release 215.00, August 2016). The number of all protein sequences in the world’s largest nonredundant protein database UniprotKB [uniprotkb] at the EBI totals 65 million (September 2016).