About GenBank
GenBank Data Usage
The GenBank database is designed to provide and encourage access within the scientific community to the most up to date and comprehensive DNA sequence information. Therefore, NCBI places no restrictions on the use or distribution of the GenBank data. However, some submitters may claim patent, copyright, or other intellectual property rights in all or a portion of the data they have submitted. NCBI is not in a position to assess the validity of such claims, and therefore cannot provide comment or unrestricted permission concerning the use, copying, or distribution of the information contained in GenBank.
Confidentiality
Some authors are concerned that the appearance of their data in GenBank prior to publication will compromise their work. GenBank will, upon request, withhold release of new submissions for a specified period of time. A date must be specified; we can not hold a sequence indefinitely pending publication. However, if the accession number or sequence data appears in print or online prior to the specified date, the sequence will be released. In order to prevent the delay in the appearance of published sequence data, we urge authors to inform us of the appearance of the published data. As soon as it is available, please send the full publication data--all authors, title, journal, volume, pages and date--to the following address: update@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Privacy
If you are submitting human sequences to GenBank, do not include any data that could reveal the personal identity of the source. GenBank assumes that the submitter has received any necessary informed consent authorizations required prior to submitting sequences.
Access to GenBank
There are several ways to search and retrieve data from GenBank.
Entrez Nucleotide is a collection of sequences from several sources, including GenBank. Text searches can retrieve data by searching for gene or product names, organism or author searches.
Search and align GenBank sequences to a query sequence using BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool). BLAST searches Nucleotide, dbEST, and dbGSS independently; see BLAST info for more information about the numerous BLAST databases.
Search, link, and download sequences programatically using NCBI e-utilities.