NCBI News, August 2009

The NCBI now maintains the Short Read Archive (SRA) (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Traces/ sra/) as a repository for data from sequencing projects that use the new massively parallel sequencing technologies, often called next-generation sequencing. These methods can generate hundreds of megabases to gigabases of data in a single instrument run, millions of times the output of a standard Sanger sequencing instrument. Applications of these technologies include sequencing of new genomes, re-sequencing of targeted genomic regions, sequencing complete genomes of multiple individuals to mine for variations, transcriptome sequencing to sample splice variants and expression levels, environmental samples and other metagenome sequencing, and chromatin DNA binding protein analysis. SRA provides the ability to search and display aspects of SRA project data through the SRA homepage (Figure 1, top panel), and the Entrez system (Figure 1, bottom panel. The SRA site also provides direct access to download data through the Aspera Connect (www.aspera.com) client that offers much faster transfers than traditional ftp. A recently added BLAST service allows searches against the transcriptome sequencing studies from the SRA data.