Accession number (bioinformatics)

An accession number in bioinformatics is a unique identifier given to a DNA or protein sequence record to allow for tracking of different versions of that sequence record and the associated sequence over time in a single data repository. Because of its relative stability, accession numbers can be utilized as foreign keys for referring to a sequence object, but not necessarily to a unique sequence. All sequence information repositories implement the concept of "accession number" but might do so with subtle variations.

Main article: GenBank

EMBL

Main article: EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database

DDBJ

Main article: DNA Databank of Japan

LRG

Main article: Locus_Reference_Genomic

Locus Reference Genomic (LRG) records have unique accession numbers starting with LRG_ followed by a number. They are recommended in the Human Genome Variation Society Nomenclature guidelines as stable genomic reference sequences to report sequence variants in LSDBs and the literature.

Commonly encountered accession numbers

• Uniprot ID
• Unified Uniprot Accession
• Uniprot-Swissprot Accession
• Uniprot-Swissprot ID
• Unified Uniprot ID
• Refseq DNA ID
• Entrez Gene ID
• CCDS ID
• Vega translation ID
• Vega Transcript ID
• Vega Peptide ID
• Vega Gene ID
• HUGO ID
• MIM ID
• LRG ID

Notes and references

1. ^ Amos Bairoch, Rolf Apweiler, Cathy H. Wu. "User Manual". UniProt Knowledgebase. http://www.expasy.org/sprot/userman.html#AC_line. Retrieved October 20, 2005. 
2.  This article incorporates public domain material from the National Center for Biotechnology Information document "NCBI Handbook".