The NCBI Entrez Genome Project Database is intended to be a searchable collection of complete and incomplete (in-progress) large-scale sequencing, assembly, annotation, and mapping projects for cellular organisms. The database is organized into organism-specific overviews that function as portals from which all projects in the database pertaining to that organism can be browsed and retrieved. For example, you will find all information regarding the human genome project on this project page.
(Although the Entrez Genome Project Database does not include organellar-, phage-, plasmid-, or viral-only genome sequencing projects, data from those projects are submitted to GenBank and are available in the Entrez Nucleotide and Entrez Genome databases. Sequences such as the human mitochondrial sequence will be attached to the human genome project. There is also a special set of resources at NCBI dedicated to Viral Genomes.)
Entrez Genome Project is a companion database to Entrez Genome. Sequence data is stored in Entrez Genome (as complete chromosomes, plasmids, organelles, and viruses) and Entrez Nucleotide (as chromosome or genomic fragments such as contigs). However, Entrez Genome does not collect all data for a given organism. The Genome Project database, on the other hand, provides an umbrella view of the status of each genome project, links to project data in the other Entrez databases, and links to a variety of other NCBI and external resources associated with a given genome project. Sequences associated with a given organism can also be retrieved in the taxonomy browser. However, no distinction is made between GenBank (non-curated) and RefSeq (curated) sequences. There is also no distinction based on which sequencing center submitted the data. Entrez Genome Project also lists projects that are in progress or for which NCBI has not yet received any data. See the table below for a comparison of all 3 databases.
Comparison of Entrez Databases.
|Entrez Database||Organism-specific sequences||Project-specific sequences||Submitter-specific sequences||Complete and in progress||GenBank and RefSeq sequences|
September 13, 2010