The NCBI is located in Bethesda, Maryland, and was founded in 1988 through legislation sponsored by US Congressman Claude Pepper.

The NCBI houses a series of databases relevant to biotechnology and biomedicine and is an important resource for bioinformatics tools and services.

NCBI was directed by David Lipman,[2] one of the original authors of the BLAST sequence alignment program[3] and a widely respected figure in bioinformatics.

The NCBI Bookshelf[6] is a collection of freely accessible, downloadable, online versions of selected biomedical books.

The Bookshelf is a complement to the Entrez PubMed repository of peer-reviewed publication abstracts in that Bookshelf contents provide established perspectives on evolving areas of study and a context in which many disparate individual pieces of reported research can be organized.

It searches the query sequence on NCBI databases and servers and posts the results back to the person's browser in the chosen format.

It serves as a major node in the nexus of the genomic map, expression, sequence, protein function, structure, and homology data.

Gene has several advantages over its predecessor, LocusLink, including, better integration with other databases in NCBI, broader taxonomic scope, and enhanced options for query and retrieval provided by the Entrez system.

Protein records are present in different formats including FASTA and XML and are linked to other NCBI resources.