DNA Data Bank of Japan

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The DNA Data Bank of Japan is a DNA data bank. It is located at the National Institute of Genetics of Japan. It is also a member of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration or INSDC. It shares its data with European Molecular Biology Laboratory at the European Bioinformatics Institute and with GenBank at the National Center for Biotechnology Information. DDBJ (DNA Data Bank of Japan) began DNA data bank activities in earnest in 1986 at the National Institute of Genetics (NIG) with the endorsement of the Ministry of Education, Science, Sport and Culture. From the beginning, DDBJ has been functioning as one of the International DNA Databases, including EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute; responsible for the EMBL database) in Europe and NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information; responsible for GenBank database) in the USA as the two other members. Consequently, we have been collaborating with the two data banks through exchanging data and information on Internet and by regularly holding two meetings, the International DNA Data Banks Advisory Meeting and the International DNA Data Banks Collaborative Meeting.

The Center for Information Biology at NIG was reorganized as the Center for Information Biology and DNA Data Bank of Japan (CIB-DDBJ) in 2001. The new center is to play a major role in carrying out research in information biology and to run DDBJ operation in the world. It is generally accepted that research in biology today requires both computer and experimental equipment equally well. In particular, we must rely on computers to analyze DNA sequence data accumulating at a remarkably rapid rate. Actually, this triggered the birth and development of information biology.

DDBJ is the sole DNA data bank in Japan, which is officially certified to collect DNA sequences from researchers and to issue the internationally recognized accession number to data submitters. We collect data mainly from Japanese researchers, but of course accept data and issue the accession number to researchers in any other countries. Since we exchange the collected data with EMBL/EBI and GenBank/NCBI on a daily basis, the three data banks share virtually the same data at any given time.