On a typical day, researchers download about 30 terabytes of data from NCBI in an effort to make discoveries. NCBI began providing online access to data in the early 1990s, starting with the GenBank database of DNA sequences. Over the years we’ve greatly expanded the types and quantity of data available. You can now find on our site descriptions and data from experimental studies such as next-generation sequencing projects, bioactivity assays for small molecules, microarray datasets and genome-wide association studies.

The White House recently recognized these efforts by awarding NCBI Director David J. Lipman with the “Open Science” Champion of Change Award [1]. The scientific community has recognized the benefits of open data. Access to this information serves as  a source of both original and supplemental data for exploration and validation [2-4], which improves the power of experimental data [5] while increasing the speed and decreasing the cost of discovery [6].

In this post, we summarize three recent cases where researchers used data from an NCBI resource/database to make significant discoveries.

Continue reading “NCBI’s Open Data – A Source of Experimental Data for Important Discoveries” →