Skip to main content
beta

Welcome to the NCBI beta website! Learn more about the Beta

Return to classic site
NCBI Beta site home page

Programs and Activities

Research-Related

NCBI innovates solutions in data representation and analysis, including the development of computer-based systems for the storage, management, and retrieval of knowledge relating to molecular biology, genetics, and biochemistry. NCBI also collaborates with NLM’s Division of Intramural Research (DIR), which includes multidisciplinary research groups composed of computer scientists, molecular biologists, research physicians, and structural biologists concentrating on basic and applied research in computational molecular biology and other areas. DIR’s research in areas such as large language models, search methodologies, structural biology, and computational molecular biology has been a springboard for enhancements to NCBI public facing resources.

Additionally, NCBI staff maintain ongoing collaborations with several institutes within NIH and with numerous academic and government research laboratories.

Databases and Software

NCBI’s public offerings have expanded greatly since the Center’s formation in 1988, with dozens of interlinked databases and multiple tools currently available. NCBI resources span from genomic sequence repositories – such as GenBank®, the Sequence Read Archive (SRA), and NCBI’s RefSeq collection of non-redundant sequences – to literature resources such as the PubMed® database of citations and abstracts for biomedical literature and PubMed Central® (PMC), a digital archive of full-text biomedical and life sciences journal literature. ClinicalTrials.gov provides information about and results from clinical studies of humans conducted around the world; other NCBI repositories focus on the connection between genes and disease, taxonomy, chemical structures, pathogen detection, gene expression, and more.

Major NCBI tools include BLAST®, the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, a program developed by NCBI for finding regions of similarity between biological sequences by comparing nucleotide or protein sequences to sequence databases and calculating the statistical significance. Other tools include the Comparative Genome Viewer, the Open Reading Frame Finder (ORFfinder), the iCn3D web-based application for viewing 3-dimensional structures, and more.

For a full list of NCBI repositories and tools with descriptions, see the link for “All NCBI Resources” under the “NCBI Resources” tab on the NCBI beta homepage.

NCBI provides web-based displays for repositories and most software tools, as well as programmatic access to content. Content is available from NCBI databases, FTP and/or commercial cloud service providers.

Outreach and Education

  • Organizes educational demonstrations and workshops for the biomedical community to foster the use of NCBI's information services
  • Conducts surveys to evaluate the use of NCBI-developed software in the biology user community
  • Coordinates with other governmental agencies and biology information resources to facilitate the development of data repositories at NCBI
  • Presents work through scientific channels such as conferences and peer-reviewed publications as well as NIH Communication channels including the NCBI Insights blog