GenBank release 273.0 (8/15/2026) is now available on the NCBI FTP site. This release has 60.07 trillion bases and 6.68 billion records.
The current release has:
- 267,383,895 traditional records containing 8,236,878,868,450 base pairs of sequence data
- 5,132,699,813 WGS records containing 50,829,714,144,609 base pairs of sequence data
- 1,082,802,170 bulk-oriented TSA records containing 923,937,913,366 base pairs of sequence data
- 193,606,949 bulk-oriented TLS records containing 80,213,567,020 base pairs of sequence data
What’s new?
During the 56 days between the close dates for GenBank releases 272.0 and 273.0, the traditional portion of GenBank grew by 618,667,947,333 basepairs and by 3,169,541 sequence records. During that same period, 58,387 records were updated. An average of 57,642 ‘traditional’ records were added and/or updated per day.
Between releases 272.0 and 273.0, the WGS component of GenBank grew by 1,752,430,422,354 basepairs and by 138,369,291 sequence records. The TSA component of GenBank grew by 12,535,954,557 basepairs and by 14,134,692 sequence records. Finally, the TLS component of GenBank grew by 608,791,758 basepairs and by 1,181,745 sequence records.
With this release, the total number of sequence data files increased by 576. The divisions are as follows:
- BCT: 6 new files, now a total of 518
- ENV: 12 new files, now a total of 53
- INV: 207 new files, now a total 2,676
- MAM: 4 new files, now a total of 244
- PAT: 4 new files, now a total of 94
- PLN: 242 new files, now a total of 3343
- ROD: 17 new files, now a total of 144
- VRL: 1 new file, now a total of 346
- VRT: 83 new files, now a total of 695
Recent and upcoming changes
The organelle Nitroplast was added in June 2026 with the release of the INSDC Feature Table Version 11.4.
GenBank is no longer receiving new quality score data as part of sequence submissions. Therefore, base quality score files will be discontinued in October 2026.
The MEDLINE line no longer exists and is obsolete. Citations in PubMed that do not fall within Medline’s scope will have only a PUBMED identifier.
Additional information
For downloading purposes, please keep in mind that the uncompressed GenBank release 273.0 sequence data flat files require roughly 11,554 GB. The ASN.1 data files require approximately 3,551 GB.
For more information about GenBank release 273.0, see the release notes, as well as the README files in the GenBank and ASN.1 (ncbi-asn1) directories on FTP.
Questions?
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