Curated Content of RefSeq Genomes

The RefSeq project aims to provide a comprehensive, high-quality, non-redundant set of annotations, including transcripts, proteins and genomic DNA. A subset of RefSeqs are manually curated by biological content experts at the gene and transcript/protein level to provide descriptors for genes, transcripts and proteins and generate known RefSeqs (NM_, NP_, NR_ accessions). While curation efforts are largely focused on human and mouse annotations, rat, chicken, cow, zebrafish, corn, tomato, and other agriculturally important species also benefit from manual curation. Curators in the RefSeq group are also involved in targeted curation of specific genes and gene-families, sometimes in collaboration with subject experts or organism-specific database resources. RefSeq staff curation results in correction of sequence or feature annotation errors that are identified by quality assurance tests, generation of additional alternative splice variants, addition of feature annotations and data attributes, and incorporation of suggestions from users. Curated RefSeq transcripts and proteins serve as reagents to NCBI’s Eukaryotic genome annotation pipeline, thereby contributing iteratively to improvements in our genome annotation products.