What Kind of Data Can be Submitted to GenBank?

GenBank is a nucleotide sequence database and will accept primary sequence data that was directly determined by the submitter.

Below are examples of submission types included in GenBank:

• mRNA Sequences
• Prokaryotic Genes
• Eukaryotic Genes
• rRNA and/or ITS
• Viral Sequences
• Transposon or Insertion Sequences
• Microsatellite Sequences
• Pseudogenes
• Cloning Vectors
• Phylogenetic or Population Sets
• Non-coding RNAs

The following submission types are accepted by GenBank, but should be submitted using their own submission tools (see below):

• Expressed Sequence Tags (EST) should be submitted directly to dbEST (the EST division of GenBank)
• Genome Survey Sequences (GSS) should be submitted directly to dbGSS (the GSS division of GenBank)
• Transcriptome Shotgun Assembly (TSA) should be submitted directly through the submission portal according to these directions.

If your submission does not fall into one of the above categories, contact vog.hin.mln.ibcn@ofni to determine which NCBI resource would be most appropriate for your submission.

For help beginning the submissions process to GenBank, see the “Submitting Sequences using Specific NCBI Submission Tools” section of this Quick Start.

The following submission types are not accepted by GenBank:

• Sequences <200 bp long. Unassembled sequences from next-generation sequencing platforms should be submitted to the Sequence Read Archive (SRA)
• A genomic sequence of multiple exons joined together without the sequence of the intervening introns or without a 'gap' of internal nnns representing the missing sequence
• Primer only sequences (These sequences can be submitted directly to NCBI’s Probe database)
• Protein only sequences
• Sequences containing a mix of genomic and mRNA sequence represented as a single sequence
• Sequences without a physical counterpart (consensus sequences)

For help beginning the submissions process to GenBank, see the “Submitting Sequences using Specific NCBI Submission Tools” section of this Quick Start.

The answer to this question depends upon the sequence contig you intend to submit.

• Sequence contigs assembled from sequence already present in International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC) sites should be submitted to NCBI’s Third Party Annotation sequence database (TPA).
• Sequence contigs assembled from nucleotides that you have sequenced yourself and assembled using sequence overlap can be submitted to GenBank. If there are gaps in your contig assembly, they must be filled with internal nnns that represent any missing sequence.
• Computer-derived mRNA assemblies should be submitted to TSA.

For help beginning the submissions process to GenBank, see the “Submitting Sequences using Specific NCBI Submission Tools” section of this Quick Start.

The best way to submit a large number of cosmid, BAC, or YAC derived genomic clones to GenBank is to submit through our High-Throughput Genomic (HTG) sequence division.

The HTG division contains unfinished high-throughput DNA sequences that are available for BLAST similarity searches against the"HTGS" database.

Note: Sequences submitted via the HTG automated system are made public immediately and cannot be held for release at a later date.

If you would like more information about submitting to the HTG division of GenBank, contact the HTG division at: vog.hin.mln.ibcn@nimda-sgth .

GenBank is a nucleotide sequence database and therefore does not accept protein-only sequence submissions.

If you do not have nucleotide sequence(s) for your protein(s), but would still like to submit your directly sequenced protein to a public database, see The Universal Protein Resource (UniProt).

GenBank does not accept primer sequences, but you can submit primers to NCBI’s Probe database, which is a public registry of nucleic acid reagents designed for use in a wide variety of biomedical research applications.

The Probe database also includes information on reagent distributors and probe effectiveness, as well as computed sequence similarities. The Probe database submission documentation provides a simple overview of the required information you will need, as well as some basic rules to follow during your submission.