List of biological databases

Biological databases are stores of biological information. The journal Nucleic Acids Research regularly publishes special issues on biological databases and has a list of such databases. The 2018 issue has a list of about 180 such databases and updates to previously described databases. Omics Discovery Index can be used to browse and search several biological databases. Furthermore, the NIAID Data Ecosystem Discovery Portal developed by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) enables searching across databases.

Meta databases are databases of databases that collect data about data to generate new data. They are capable of merging information from different sources and making it available in a new and more convenient form, or with an emphasis on a particular disease or organism. Originally, metadata was only a common term referring simply to data about data such as tags, keywords, and markup headers.

Model organism databases provide in-depth biological data for intensively studied organisms.

The primary databases make up the International Nucleotide Sequence Database (INSD). The include:

DDBJ (Japan), GenBank (USA) and European Nucleotide Archive (Europe) are repositories for nucleotide sequence data from all organisms. All three accept nucleotide sequence submissions, and then exchange new and updated data on a daily basis to achieve optimal synchronisation between them. These three databases are primary databases, as they house original sequence data. They collaborate with Sequence Read Archive (SRA), which archives raw reads from high-throughput sequencing instruments.

Secondary databases are:^{[clarification needed]}

Other databases

Generic gene expression databases