Upcoming Change in My Bibliography

Use of earliest publication date for determining NIH Public Access compliance

As shared in the July National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Insights post, NCBI at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) is making ongoing improvements to several offerings to support implementation of the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy.

Effective October 1, 2025, My Bibliography will begin using the earliest publication date listed in PubMed records (whether print or electronic) in support of implementation of the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy update, which defines the Official Date of Publication as:

“The date on which the Final Published Article is first made available in final, edited form, whether in print or electronic (i.e., online) format.” Continue reading “Upcoming Change in My Bibliography” →

An Updated Bacterial and Archaeal Reference Genome Collection is Available!

Download the updated bacterial and archaeal reference genome collection! We built this collection of 22,082 genomes by selecting the “best” genome assembly for each species among the 440,000+ prokaryotic genomes in RefSeq.

What’s new?

28 species are represented in this collection for the first time
228 species are represented by a better assembly
Six species were removed because of changes in NCBI Taxonomy or uncertainty in their species assignment

Continue reading “An Updated Bacterial and Archaeal Reference Genome Collection is Available!” →

GenBank Release 268.0 is Available!

GenBank release 268.0 (8/18/2025) is now available on the NCBI FTP site. This release has 47.01 trillion bases and 5.90 billion records.

The current release has:

258,320,620 traditional records containing 5,676,067,778,413 base pairs of sequence data
4,441,331,387 WGS records containing 40,390,433,406,298 base pairs of sequence data
1,010,159,820 bulk-oriented TSA records containing 864,483,775,194 base pairs of sequence data
190,505,830 bulk-oriented TLS records containing 78,568,415,110 base pairs of sequence data

Continue reading “GenBank Release 268.0 is Available!” →

Upcoming Changes to GenBank Project Lists and Symlinks

The volume of GenBank WGS, TSA, and TLS data sets is large and continues to grow rapidly. To help you identify and retrieve newly released data, we began providing symlinks and project list files in the Index of /genbank/daily-nc area approximately 12 years ago.

What’s new?

As the number of projects and files increases, the current symlink and project list mechanisms have resulted in FTP performance issues when retrieving data. Continue reading “Upcoming Changes to GenBank Project Lists and Symlinks” →

PubMed Central (PMC) Beta Search to Replace Current Search

Coming the week of September 7th

The new PubMed Central (PMC) Beta search will replace the current PMC search the week of September 7, 2025.

As previously announced, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is working on an update to PMC full-text search functionality and user experience. To prepare for this transition, we released a Beta version in April for you to preview and test. Based on your input, we have already made several improvements. There is still time to provide feedback; we invite you to try out PMC Beta search now and let us know what you think! Continue reading “PubMed Central (PMC) Beta Search to Replace Current Search” →

Now Live: Improved Representation of Functional Data in ClinVar!

ClinVar is pleased to announce that our improved representation of functional data is live on the website, in file submissions, and in downloadable XML files. The following documentation is provided to facilitate future submissions and downloads:

Continue reading “Now Live: Improved Representation of Functional Data in ClinVar!” →

Now Available! NCBI Hidden Markov Models (HMM) Release 18.0

Download release 18.0 of the NCBI protein profile Hidden Markov models (HMMs) used by the Prokaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline (PGAP). Search this collection against your favorite prokaryotic proteins to identify their function using the HMMER sequence analysis package.

What’s new?

Release 18.0 contains:

18,057 HMMs maintained by NCBI
631 new HMMs since release 17.0

Continue reading “Now Available! NCBI Hidden Markov Models (HMM) Release 18.0” →

Coming Soon: ClinVar Search Enhancements

As previously announced, NCBI is improving the ClinVar homepage to serve as a better introduction to data and services within the resource. We are also enhancing your search experience in ClinVar!

Search enhancements

We are introducing a multiple box search interface where you can enter one or more terms. Each box will be labeled for the type of term that can be entered there. For example, if you search by gene only, you will be able to enter one or more genes in the Gene search box. Each search box will have examples available to demonstrate how to format certain search terms. Continue reading “Coming Soon: ClinVar Search Enhancements” →

Improved Gene Data Access with Redesigned NCBI Gene Pages

We are excited to announce redesigned NCBI Gene pages! The redesigned pages (available through NCBI Datasets) offer a modern, clean interface with an intuitive layout that makes browsing and downloading NCBI Gene data easier. The legacy Gene page will continue to be available during this transition period, and we will continue to communicate updates and changes through NCBI websites and this blog.

What’s new?

Improved Search Capabilities: The new Gene landing page offers improved search functionality, allowing users to find gene information more effectively. Users can now search by taxon, locus tag and symbol (with or without specifying a taxon, and above species level) in addition to NCBI GeneID and accession.

Continue reading “Improved Gene Data Access with Redesigned NCBI Gene Pages” →

NCBI Website Maintenance — Beginning July 25th

On Friday, July 25th, starting at 9:00 PM EDT, we’ll be performing essential maintenance on the NLM data center. This upgrade is critical to ensure the continued reliability and stability of our services.

We anticipate this planned outage will last 24 hours or more. During this time, users may experience interrupted access or degraded performance across a range of NLM resources, including databases, search tools, submission systems, and programmatic services.

We understand this may cause inconvenience, and we sincerely apologize for the disruption. We’re committed to minimizing impact and will provide timely updates throughout the process.

We expect all NCBI products and services to be fully available again by Monday, July 28th.