Changes

<p>Walter Goad of the Theoretical Biology and Biophysics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory and others established the Los Alamos Sequence Database in 1979, which culminated in 1982 with the creation of the public GenBank funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense. LANL collaborated on GenBank with the firm Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, and by the end of 1983 more than 2,000 sequences were stored in it.</p>

<p>In the mid 1980s, the Intelligenetics bioinformatics company at Stanford University managed the GenBank project in collaboration with LANL. As one of the earliest bioinformatics community projects on the Internet, the GenBank project started BIOSCI/Bionet news groups for promoting open access communications among bioscientists. During 1989 to 1992, the GenBank project transitioned to the newly created National Center for Biotechnology Information.</p>

<p><span class="editsection"></span><span class="mw-headline"><font size="5">Growth of GenBank</font></span></p>

<p>The GenBank release notes for release 162.0 (October, 2007) state that &quot;from 1982 to the present, the number of bases in GenBank has doubled approximately every 18 months.&quot; The following plot clearly shows the exponential growth. (On a semi-log scale such as this, a straight line represents an exponential change.)</p>