National Center for Biotechnology Information

The National Center for Biotechnology Information is a division of the United States National Library of Medicine, itself part of the National Institutes of Health, based in Bethesda, Maryland. Congress created it through legislation sponsored by Representative Claude Pepper, enacted on November 4, 1988, to standardize how biotechnology databases were organized so researchers could retrieve genetic and biomedical information more easily. NCBI now operates as a storage repository and distribution center for biotechnology data, building tools that analyze the information it holds rather than simply archiving it. Its best known resources include GenBank, the public repository of DNA sequences, and PubMed, the biomedical literature database, both searchable through the center's Entrez system. Stephen Sherry has directed NCBI since September 26, 2022.