The 1992 Global Convention on Biological Diversity (Rio de Janeiro) specified the need to make biodiversity data available "despite imperfections, rather than holding back information until more polished products are completed." Few organizations have done so. This Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew, UK) genome biodiversity database is one valuable exception. Founded in 1759, the Royal Botanic Gardens,...

The International Barcode of Life (iBOL) brings together scientists and scientific organizations from all over the world with an aim to "illuminate biodiversity - every multicellular species - for the benefit of all life." The iBOL research alliance is an internal collaboration that builds DNA barcode reference libraries, along with associated facilities, platforms, and protocols needed to...

This website describes DNA Banking at the Missouri Botanical Garden. The site provides brief sections covering background, goals, and organization of the collection. A link is provided to the Applied Research DNA Specimen Database which "is organized alphabetically by plant family, genus, and species and individual taxa can be selected to display information on samples in the collection." This...

The National Center for Biotechnology Information presents the first full release of all NCBI Reference Sequence (RefSeq) records. RefSeq "aims to provide a comprehensive, integrated, non-redundant set of sequences, including genomic DNA, transcript (RNA), and protein products for major research organisms." The database currently includes over 785,000 proteins from numerous organisms, and...