As of September 2007 the GBD contains data for 11 mammalian species including human, mouse, rat, chimpanzee, rhesus macaque, horse, cow, cat, dog, opossum and platypus; 8 other vertebrates: chicken, lizard (Anolis carolinensis), frog (Xenopus tropicalis), zebrafish, fugu, tetraodon, medaka and stickleback; and 21 invertebrates including 11 flies, honeybee, Anopheles mosquito, five worms, one yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and two deuterostomes—purple sea urchin and sea squirt. For many of the organisms, more than one assembly is provided, and several older archived assemblies may be found at: http://genome-archive.cse.ucsc.edu/. The GBD stores a collection of annotation data for each assembly, which can be viewed graphically in the UCSC Genome Browser (2) as a series of ‘tracks’ aligned to the genomic sequence and grouped according to shared characteristics, for example gene predictions, gene expression and variation data. In most instances, each annotation track is represented by a position-oriented table based on genomic sequence coordinates, and may be supplemented by additional non-positional tables that supply related information or link the primary table to other tables in the database. The data are stored in a variety of formats described at: http://genome.ucsc.edu/FAQ/FAQformat.
