Citing budgetary constraints, the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) has reported it will retire its Sequence Read Archive (SRA) and Trace Archive repositories for high-throughput sequence data, as well as the Peptidome Repository for mass spectrometry–based proteomics data sets.
Closure of the databases is scheduled to occur in phases. In the coming weeks, the NCBI will stop accepting some submission types to SRA and Trace Archive. Within the next 12 months, all submission types will be phased out. The Peptidome Repository online browser, query, and display interfaces will be phased out in the coming weeks.
NCBI director David Lipman said in a statement that news of the SRA closure should not come as unexpected, given the evolution of next-generation sequencing applications and development of other centralized data repositories in the biomedical and life sciences.
Despite the closures, the NCBI noted that it “will continue to support and develop information resources for biological data derived from next-generation sequencing such as genotypes, common variations, rare variations, sequence assemblies, and gene expression data.” It also encouraged researchers to continue submitting such data to the appropriate databases, including the Gene Expression Omnibus, dbVar, dbGaP, dbSNP, and GenBank.
