GenBank release 270.0 (2/18/2026) is now available on the NCBI FTP site. This release has 51.56 trillion bases and 6.12 billion records.  The current release has:   260,943,419 traditional records containing 7,010,340,901,567 base pairs of sequence data  4,620,211,924 WGS records containing 43,580,847,616,334 base pairs of sequence data  1,046,996,602 bulk-oriented TSA records containing 889,101,948,297 base pairs of sequence data  191.365,090 bulk-oriented TLS records containing 79,162,820,303 base pairs of sequence data  What’s new?  During the 66 days between … Continue reading GenBank Release 270.0 →

5 March 2026

With a new tool to compare clinical genetic tests!  NCBI is pleased to announce an improved search and navigation experience in the NIH Genetic Testing Registry (GTR®). We previously highlighted a number of updates during the Beta phase of implementation— thank you for your feedback during this time. All updates are now live in GTR!  What’s new?  One search box for single … Continue reading Now Live: Genetic Testing Registry (GTR®) Search Improvements →

4 March 2026

Enhancing Functional Data Submission   The ClinVar team is excited to announce updates to the ClinVar Submission API for improved representation of functional data. A previous blog post described these improvements for functional data in file submissions, downloadable FTP files, and our website.   What’s new?  The Submission API schema has been updated! If you generate functional data for variants, you can now use the Submission API … Continue reading Update to ClinVar’s Submission API →

2 March 2026

RefSeq release 233 is now available online and from the FTP site! You can access RefSeq data through NCBI Datasets. The release is provided in several directories as a complete dataset and also as divided by logical groupings.    What’s included in this release?  As of January 26, 2026, this full release incorporates genomic, transcript, and protein data containing:   578,285,616 records  442,943,508 proteins  … Continue reading Now Available: RefSeq Release 233 →

19 February 2026

PMC will make major changes to our Article Dataset Distribution Services in 2026. In August 2026, you will need to access full text article data files through the PMC Cloud Service instead of the PMC FTP Service. This change will provide you with more reliable performance, faster retrieval times, and greater flexibility in retrieving only the types and number of files you wish to work with.   Since this may impact operational workflows, … Continue reading Changes to PMC Article Dataset Distribution Services Coming in 2026 →

12 February 2026

Download release 19.0 of the NCBI protein profile Hidden Markov models (HMMs) used by the Prokaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline (PGAP). You can search this collection against your favorite prokaryotic proteins to identify their function using the HMMER sequence analysis package.   What’s new?   Release 19.0 contains:   18,513 HMMs maintained by NCBI   465 new HMMs since release 18.0   You can search and view the details for these … Continue reading Now Available! NCBI Hidden Markov Models (HMM) Release 19.0 →

11 February 2026

Providing free and open access to scientific literature and data   Do you love biomolecular data as much as we do? Join NCBI in celebrating International Love Data Week, February 9-13, 2026! Love Data Week is an international celebration of data, which takes place every year during the week of Valentine’s Day. This year’s theme is “Where’s the Data?” and encourages us … Continue reading NCBI Celebrates International Love Data Week! →

10 February 2026

Are you a GenBank submitter? Do you use BankIt or the GenBank app in the NCBI Submission Portal to submit your sequences? Or do you split your data between the two systems?    Starting this spring, you will be able to complete all GenBank submissions in the portal! The Submission Portal GenBank will support data types that you currently submit through BankIt. You will no longer … Continue reading BankIt Submitters: Upcoming Changes to How You Submit to GenBank →

27 January 2026

With the latest release of EGAPx, we’re excited to announce that you can now submit genome assemblies with EGAPx annotations directly to GenBank. We’re making it easier for researchers to share richly annotated eukaryotic genomes, complete with structural and functional features generated by the EGAPx pipeline.  What’s new?  Easily integrate your EGAPx annotations into GenBank: You can now attach the EGAPx-generated ASN.1 annotation … Continue reading GenBank Now Supports EGAPx-Based Annotation →

14 January 2026

Download the updated bacterial and archaeal reference genome collection! We built this collection of 22,420 genomes by selecting the “best” genome assembly for each species among the 450,000+ prokaryotic genomes in RefSeq.  What’s new?  One species is represented in this collection for the first time  323 species are represented by a better assembly Six species were removed because … Continue reading An Updated Bacterial and Archaeal Reference Genome Collection is Available! →

13 January 2026