Fungal diversity in GenBank

Article By:

Ozerskaya, Svetlana M. G. K. Skryabin Institute of Biochemistry and Physiology of Microorganisms RAS, All-Russian Collection of Microorganisms, Russian Federation.

Last reviewed:2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1036/1097-8542.YB120269

Genetic databases are indispensable in systematics, phylogenetic studies, and identification of fungal taxa of different ranks on the basis of gene sequence comparisons. GenBank, located at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in the United States, and its international database partners, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL, United Kingdom) and the DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ, Japan), house the majority of DNA sequences produced by researchers investigating fungal diversity. Each of these databases is updated daily, but at the expense of interchanging the new DNA sequences submitted to any one of them. According to recent information, the size of GenBank exceeds 195 gigabytes and the number of sequences therein is doubled every 18 months. The total number of nucleotide fungal sequences in GenBank is approximately 3.0 million. GenBank also contains data on the number of nucleotide sequences for any specific taxa. For example, Saccharomyces pastorianus has 978,121 sequences, Saccharomyces cerevisiae has 57,038 sequences, and Moniliophthora perniciosa has 53,740 sequences.

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