How did the SRA come about?
OSTELL: The SRA came out of the Trace Archive activity, which was originally started for the mouse genome [shotgun sequencing] project. People thought they’d need a place to combine reads from a number of different centers and have one collection that you could try with different assemblers. That very quickly grew in demand, expanded, and became international when the Sanger Center Trace Archive joined. It was recently moved to EBI [European Bioinformatics Institute] and DDBJ [Data Bank of Japan] created a resource as well. We started exchanging data. With the advent of short-read technology, it was clear that the database design of the trace repository would not scale to short reads, so NCBI architected the design basically to accommodate the bulk expected from short reads but also to learn from some of the history of the design of the trace archive. For example, in the trace archive, a lot of the metadata about each experiment is associated with each trace. That could be an issue whe
