NCBI (National Center For Biotechnology Information)

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is part of the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), a branch of the National Institutes of Health. The NCBI is located in Bethesda, Maryland(38.994994°N 77.099339°W ) and was founded in 1988 through legislation sponsored by Senator Claude Pepper. The NCBI houses genome sequencing data in GenBank and an index of biomedical research articles in PubMed Central and PubMed, as well as other information relevant to biotechnology. All these databases are available online through the Entrez search engine.

The NCBI is directed by David Lipman, one of the original authors of the BLAST sequence alignment program and a widely respected figure in Bioinformatics. He also leads an intramural research program, including groups led by Stephen Altschul (another BLAST co-author), David Landsman, and Eugene Koonin (a prolific author on comparative genomics).