Seqret and GIs

[Francis Ouellette]

On Wed, 27 Mar 2002, Peter Rice wrote:

> Bonjour Francis!!! 

Bonjour Peter!
 
> I like SVs because it makes it possible to
> find the current version of any sequence and to guess the SV of all
> previous versions. 

Be carefull, that may be a false sense of security! In February 1999,
everything in DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank got version 1, even if it was the 1st
or 10 version for a given sequence.

For example, AC000003 shows version 1 (and to show non-partisanship,
here it is in EMBL format:) 


ID   HSAC00003  standard; DNA; HUM; 122228 BP.
XX
AC   AC000003;
XX
SV   AC000003.1
XX
DT   01-OCT-1996 (Rel. 49, Created)
DT   07-MAR-2000 (Rel. 63, Last updated, Version 6)

but is really the third sequence version (3rd gi) for that record.

See: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/entrez/sutils/girevhist.cgi?val=AC000003

(and of course, the Version on the DT line has nothing to do with the
sequence version (SV or or VERSION lines -- that would be too simple 
:-).

But you are right, if after Feb 1999 I would have updated the sequence
of the AC000003, then that new one would be version 2 (AC000003.2) and
it is a *lot* easier for a human to track sequence version changes
when you see the incremental increase -- but (my point here) is that
just because you are looking at VS X00001.1 it doesn't mean you have
the first version the databases (DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank) have ever seen.

cheers from the west coast,

f.


--
| B.F. Francis Ouellette                       francis at cmmt.ubc.ca | 
| Director, Bioinformatics Core Facility       Tel: (604) 875-3815 | 
| Centre for Molecular Medicine & Therapeutics Fax: (425) 740-6978 | 
| Vancouver, BC Canada            http://www.cmmt.ubc.ca/ouellette |