A Summary of Genomic Databases: Overview and Discussion

In the last few years both the amount of electronically stored biological data and the number of biological data repositories grew up significantly (today, more than eight hundred can be counted thereof). In spite of the enormous amount of available resources, a user may be disoriented when he/she searches for specific data. Thus, the accurate analysis of biological data and repositories turn out to be useful to obtain a systematic view of biological database structures, tools and contents and, eventually, to facilitate the access and recovery of such data. In this chapter, we propose an analysis of genomic databases, which are databases of fundamental importance for the research in bioinformatics. In particular, we provide a small catalog of 74 selected genomic databases, analyzed and classified by considering both their biological contents and their technical features (e.g, how they may be queried, the database schemas they are based on, the different data formats, etc.). We think that such a work may be an useful guide and reference for everyone needing to access and to retrieve information from genomic databases.