An accession number, in

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and Bioinformatics software, software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, ...

, is a unique identifier given to a

DNA Deoxyribonucleic acid (; DNA) is a polymer composed of two polynucleotide chains that coil around each other to form a double helix. The polymer carries genetic instructions for the development, functioning, growth and reproduction of al ...

protein Proteins are large biomolecules and macromolecules that comprise one or more long chains of amino acid residue (biochemistry), residues. Proteins perform a vast array of functions within organisms, including Enzyme catalysis, catalysing metab ...

sequence record to allow for tracking of different versions of that sequence record and the associated sequence over time in a single data repository. Because of its relative stability, accession numbers can be utilized as

foreign key A foreign key is a set of attributes in a table that refers to the primary key of another table, linking these two tables. In the context of relational databases, a foreign key is subject to an inclusion dependency constraint that the tuples ...

s for referring to a sequence object, but not necessarily to a unique sequence. All sequence information repositories implement the concept of "accession number" but might do so with subtle variations.

LRG

Locus Reference Genomic (LRG) records have unique accession numbers starting with LRG_ followed by a number. They are recommended in th
Human Genome Variation Society Nomenclature guidelines
as stable genomic reference sequences to report sequence variants in LSDBs and the literature.

Notes and references

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External links

* {{cite web , title=Sample GenBank Record , website=National Center for Biotechnology Information , date=2021-01-12 , url=https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/samplerecord/ , ref={{sfnref , National Center for Biotechnology Information , 2021 , access-date=2024-03-14 sample

GenBank The GenBank sequence database is an open access, annotated collection of all publicly available nucleotide sequences and their protein translations. It is produced and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI; a par ...

record Bioinformatics