NCBI also has a resource called Gene
that integrates lots of useful information about each gene.
It is a good starting point for you to learn about a gene of your interest.
For example, as shown in this example,
the function chromosomal location, gene ontology,
genetic variation pathway, interaction of a gene are all shown in one page.
How convenient.
As of the end of 2013, NCBI-Gene resource provides annotations for
about 14 million genes in 11,000 species.
If you're studying human genes, there is another great resource with even
more annotations than NCBI-Gene, and that is GeneCards.
GeneCards is a curated secondary database of extensive experimental and
predictive data about each human gene.
It is an excelent starting point for learning about a human gene.
By the way, GeneCard is not part of the NCBI.
Another important resource at NCBI is to Sequence Read Archive,
SRA, which we have touched upon in earlier lectures.
SRA stores raw sequencing data from the next generation sequencing technologies.
From the SRA, you can download not only the raw read sequences, but
also metadata about the experiment design,
sample information, library sequencing platform, and so on.
Thus of the end of 2013, SRA contains 2.69
peta based pairs of data from over 323,000
sum post in over 27,000 records.
As this figure shows, the data has been increasing
exponentially since SRA was created in 2007.
The amount of data doubles every five months.
This figure was made in September of 2013.
It is already obsolete just three months later.