NCBI News, August 2010

Cooper P, Lipshultz D.

Publication Details

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New Databases and Tools

NCBI Publication

Cooper P, Lipshultz D, Matten WT, McGinnis SD, Pechous S, Romiti ML, Tao T, Valjavec-Gratian M, Sayers EW. Education resources of the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Brief Bioinform. 2010 Jun 22 [Epub ahead of print]. PMID: 20570844

Microbial Genomes

Twenty finished microbial genomes were released during August 2010. The original sequence data files submitted to GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ are available on the FTP site: ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/genbank/genomes/Bacteria/. The RefSeq provisional versions of these genomes are also available: ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/genomes/Bacteria/.

GenBank News

GenBank release 179.0 is available via web and FTP. The current release includes information available as of August 16, 2010. Release notes are available on the on the NCBI ftp site: ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/genbank/gbrel.txt

Updates and Enhancements

PubMed

In July 2010, PubMed hit a milestone by adding its 20 millionth citation. Ten million PubMed citations have links to the full-text version of the article.

Genome Workbench

Genome Workbench version 2.1.2 was released with improvements and fixes. New features include support for 64-bit Windows 7 allowing researchers to study bigger, more complicated sequences; revamped network setup to be more tolerant of restrictive firewalls; more robust BLAST implementation; and new rendering for variation tracks. In addition, the application has been tuned to reduce memory consumption. Complete release details can be found in the Release Notes: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/gbench/release-notes.html

BLAST

BLAST executable version 2.2.4 was released with new features as well as bug fixes. For example, the BLAST Archive format was introduced to permit reformatting of stand-alone BLAST searches with the blast-formatter. For a complete list of fixes and features, see the BLAST News page and follow links to download the application.

Announce Lists and RSS Feeds

Eighteen topic-specific mailing lists are available which provide email announcements about changes and updates to NCBI resources including dbGaP, BLAST, GenBank, and Sequin. The various lists are described on the Announcement List summary page: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Sitemap/Summary/email_lists.html. To receive updates on the NCBI News, please see: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/About/news/announce_submit.html.

Twelve RSS feeds are now available from NCBI including news on PubMed, PubMed Central, NCBI Bookshelf, LinkOut, HomoloGene, UniGene, and NCBI Announce. Please see: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/feed/.

Users can also stay updated on NCBI’s resources on Facebook and Twitter: twitter.com/NCBI.

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