The RefSeq homepage http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/refseq/ is a central hub for all aspects of the RefSeq dataset. This site provides links that guide users through a general description of the project as well as factsheets, growth statistics and information on more focused RefSeq projects such as the Prokaryotic genome re-annotation initiative, the Consensus Coding Sequence (CCDS) project (11) the RefSeqGene project, and Targeted Loci (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/refseq/targetedloci/) projects. Links to the most current comprehensive FTP release and detailed documentation on the format and content of the release can be found in the ‘Announcements’ section of the RefSeq homepage. Previous RefSeq announcements are also available from this page. We strongly encourage downloading RefSeq data directly from NCBI, as downloads from other bioinformatics and genome browser resources may not include all of the available data, or may merely reflect alignments of RefSeq transcripts to a genome rather than the genome annotation results that are generated by NCBI.
