biology databases
sporte | June 20, 2008It's pretty common these days to pick up an issue of Science or Nature and see people ranting about GenBank (1). Many of the rants are triggered, at least in part, by a wide-spread misunderstanding of what GenBank is and how it works. Perhaps this can be solved through education, but I don't think that's likely. People from the NCBI can explain over and over again that some of the sequence databases in GenBank are meant to be an archival resource (2), and define the term "archive," but that's not going to help.
Confusion about database content and oversight is widespread in this…