Accessing GenBank and moving around NCBI databases

Although you may have your own data to analyze, you will probably need existing genomic datasets. Here, we will look at how to access such databases at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). We will not only discuss GenBank, but also other databases at NCBI. Many people refer (wrongly) to the whole set of NCBI databases as GenBank, but NCBI includes the nucleotide database and many others, for example, PubMed.

As sequencing analysis is a long subject, and this book targets intermediate to advanced users, we will not be very exhaustive with a topic that is, at its core, not very complicated. Nonetheless, it's a good warm-up for the more complex recipes that we will see at the end of this chapter.