The Entrez Projects database, formerly known as Entrez Genome Project, provides an overview of the status of a variety of genomic projects, ranging from large-scale sequencing and assembly projects to projects focused on a particular locus, such as 16S ribosomal RNA or a notable medical event, such as the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak. While over 90% of the >5200 projects are traditional single-organism sequencing projects, the scope of the database continues to expand so that it now includes viral population projects, metagenome and environmental sampling projects, comparative genomics projects and transcriptome projects. Entrez Projects links to project data in the other Entrez databases, such as Entrez Nucleotide and Genome and to a variety of other NCBI and external resources. For prokaryotic organisms, Entrez Projects indexes a number of characteristics of interest to biologists such as organism morphology and motility, pathogenicity and environmental requirements such as salinity, temperature, oxygen levels and pH range. NCBI encourages depositors to register their projects early in their development so that project data can be linked via the project ID to other NCBI-hosted data at the earliest opportunity.
