Biological databases are stores of biological information.[1] The journal Nucleic Acids Research regularly publishes special issues on biological databases and has a list of such databases. The 2018 issue has a list of about 180 such databases and updates to previously described databases.[2] Omics Discovery Index can be used to browse and search several biological databases. Furthermore, the NIAID Data Ecosystem Discovery Portal developed by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) enables searching across databases.
Meta databases are databases of databases that collect data about data to generate new data. They are capable of merging information from different sources and making it available in a new and more convenient form, or with an emphasis on a particular disease or organism. Originally, metadata was only a common term referring simply to data about data such as tags, keywords, and markup headers.
Model organism databases provide in-depth biological data for intensively studied organisms.
The primary databases make up the International Nucleotide Sequence Database (INSD). The include:
DDBJ (Japan), GenBank (USA) and European Nucleotide Archive (Europe) are repositories for nucleotide sequence data from all organisms. All three accept nucleotide sequence submissions, and then exchange new and updated data on a daily basis to achieve optimal synchronisation between them. These three databases are primary databases, as they house original sequence data. They collaborate with Sequence Read Archive (SRA), which archives raw reads from high-throughput sequencing instruments.
Secondary databases are:[clarification needed]
Other databases
Generic gene expression databases
Microarray gene expression databases
These databases collect genome sequences, annotate and analyze them, and provide public access. Some add curation of experimental literature to improve computed annotations. These databases may hold many species genomes, or a single model organism genome.
(See also: List of proteins in the human body)
Several publicly available data repositories and resources have been developed to support and manage protein related information, biological knowledge discovery and data-driven hypothesis generation.[15] The databases in the table below are selected from the databases listed in the Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) databases issues and database collection and the databases cross-referenced in the UniProtKB. Most of these databases are cross-referenced with UniProt / UniProtKB so that identifiers can be mapped to each other.[15]
Proteins in human:
There are about ~20,000 protein coding genes in the standard human genome. (Roughly ~1200 already have Wikipedia articles - the Gene Wiki - about them) if we are Including splice variants, there could be as many as 500,000 unique human proteins[16]
Numerous databases collect information about species and other taxonomic categories. The Catalogue of Life is a special case as it is a meta-database of about 150 specialized "global species databases" (GSDs) that have collected the names and other information on (almost) all described and thus "known" species.
Images play a critical role in biomedicine, ranging from images of anthropological specimens to zoology. However, there are relatively few databases dedicated to image collection, although some projects such as iNaturalist collect photos as a main part of their data. A special case of "images" are 3-dimensional images such as protein structures or 3D-reconstructions of anatomical structures. Image databases include, among others:[22]