Making Your Genbank Entry Count

sequence submissions becoming standard fare. Some scientists, however, are doing a messy job of their GenBank submission because they are in a hurry to get a GenBank accession number so that they can publish their sequence data in an academic journal (proof of GenBank submission is required by most publishers). The irony is that the GenBank entry for a given nucleotide sequence is often more important, from a practical point of view, than the journal article describing that sequence, meaning many researchers are skimming over the most important part of their data presentation. Adding to this problem is that most universities do not teach their science students how to write a GenBank entry. As an undergraduate in Genetics, I learned how to effectively communicate my results to the scientific community by writing lab reports and giving class presentations, but I was never taught how to impart these results through online sequence repositories. When it came time to prepare my first GenBank entry, as part of my fourth-year honors project, I winged it. Looking back at that submission now, I give it a 4-out-of 10 for quality. I annotated the tRNAand rRNA-coding regions as “functional RNAs,” but did not label them as “genes,” and I did not even know that pseudogenes should (and could) be included in the entry. A 10-out-of-10 submission would have contained annotations for all of the different genomic architectural features. The National Center for Biotechnology Information does provide some instructions on how to deposit sequences in GenBank, but these are mostly rules for using the submission software rather than guidelines for preparing an effective entry. During my PhD work, when I regularly devoted whole days to depositing data into GenBank, I asked a distinguished professor of bioinformatics for suggesMaking your GenBank entry count