Dear all,
Thanks to interim funding, the National Center for Biotechnology Information’s Sequence Read Archive and Trace Archive databases will continue for now.
With interim funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) will continue to accept submissions and maintain the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) and Trace Archive repositories.
Earlier this year, the NCBI announced that these repositories for high-throughput sequence data would be discontinued due to budgetary constraints. However, because several large-scale NIH projects depend on SRA and Trace Archive, the NIH has provided funding for these resources until 1 October 2011.
“A small number of large projects dominate the cost for SRA, and the NIH institutes that handle those projects are arranging to either provide direct funding to NCBI for the SRA costs associated with the projects, or they are making alternative arrangements for the data,” NCBI user support representative Monica Romiti told
BioTechniques in an e-mail.
In addition, NCBI now plans to continue archiving a subset of next-generation sequencing data after the interim funding expires, including:
- RNA-Seq, ChIP-Seq, and epigenomic data submitted to Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO).
- Genomic and transcriptomic assemblies submitted to GenBank.
- 16S Ribosomal RNA data associated with metagenomics submitted to GenBank.
Meanwhile, the third NCBI database that was scheduled to be discontinued has not found similar support. The NCBI has already phased out the Peptidome Repository for mass spectrometry-based proteomics data sets and no longer accepts further submissions.
In contrast, the NCBI’s international collaborators, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory–European Bioinformatics Institute and the DNA Data Bank of Japan, have restated their plans to continue archiving raw sequencing data for the foreseeable future.
