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 part of the National Institutes of Health in the United States) as part of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC).

GenBank and its collaborators receive sequences produced in laboratories throughout the world from more than 100,000 distinct organisms. The database started in 1982 by Walter Goad and Los Alamos National Laboratory. GenBank has become an important database for research in biological fields and has grown in recent years at an exponential rate by doubling roughly every 18 months.

Release 242.0, produced in February 2021, contained over 12 trillion nucleotide bases in more than 2 billion sequences. GenBank is built by direct submissions from individual laboratories, as well as from bulk submissions from large-scale sequencing centers.

 

Note:   The above text is excerpted from the Wikipedia article GenBank, which has been released under the GNU Free Documentation License.