How does the SRA relate to GenBank?
OSTELL: There are two relationships. One is a structural biological relationship—SRA has the reads and it will also have eventually the alignment of the reads to the reference genome. It doesn’t have the assembled sequence—that goes to GenBank. Ultimately, structurally you’d like to have the assembly, the reads, and the alignment all connected together, even though they go to repositories with different repositories and different needs. The ID’s will match them up. The political thing is that, since the TA and SRA began as NCBI projects and then got picked up by [Wellcome Trust] Sanger [Institute]… There’s been consolidation on the European side. The trace archive moved from Sanger to EBI. In addition, DDBJ, the third partner in the GenBank partnership, said they’d have a short read archive. At our last meeting, we agreed to officially make the trace archive and SRA part of the GenBank-EMBL-DDBJ collaboration. We’re beginning to integrate them together. EBI has an SRA running—they’ve t
