What is ENA?

The European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) provides a comprehensive, accessible and publicly available repository for nucleotide sequence data. ENA attracts users from a multitude of research disciplines and serves as an underlying data infrastructure for other EMBL-EBI services, including Ensembl, Ensembl Genomes, UniProt and ArrayExpress. Data submitted to ENA are validated by automated quality checking.

The foundation for ENA was the EMBL Data Library, which was established at EMBL Heidelberg in the early 1980s. Originally started as a primary database for assembled and annotated sequences, ENA’s remit has expanded enormously in response to advances in sequencing technology and the broad applications of sequence data. ENA now incorporates lots of raw read data in which all generations of sequencing technology are represented. ENA provides access to the whole scale of sequencing information: from raw read data, to assemblies of these into contigs and higher order structures such as scaffolds and chromosomes, through to high-level functional annotation.

Why do I need ENA?

Nucleotide sequence information is crucial to our understanding of biology, from genetics and molecular interactions through to organism-wide processes. Free access to nucleotide sequence data is therefore essential for life science research, for tasks such as primer design, comparing sequences to those in the public domain, and gene expression analysis. As large-scale sequencing becomes faster and cheaper, the need to deposit, search and analyse information in a central archive that is publicly available and easily accessible continues to grow.