Accession number

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An accession number in bioinformatics is a unique identifier given to a DNA or protein sequence record to allow for tracking of different versions of that sequence record and the associated sequence over time in a single data repository. Because of its relative stability, accession numbers can be utilized as foreign keys for referring to a sequence object, but not necessarily to a unique sequence. All sequence information repositories implement the concept of "accession number" but might do so with subtle variations.

EMBL

DDBJ

LRG

Locus Reference Genomic (LRG) records have unique accession numbers starting with LRG_ followed by a number. They are recommended in the Human Genome Variation Society Nomenclature guidelines as stable genomic reference sequences to report sequence variants in LSDBs and the literature.

Commonly encountered accession numbers

• Uniprot ID
• Unified Uniprot Accession
• Uniprot-Swissprot Accession
• Uniprot-Swissprot ID
• Unified Uniprot ID
• Refseq DNA ID
• Entrez Gene ID
• CCDS ID
• Vega translation ID
• Vega Transcript ID
• Vega Peptide ID
• Vega Gene ID
• HUGO ID
• MIM ID
• LRG ID

Notes and references

1. ^ Amos Bairoch, Rolf Apweiler, Cathy H. Wu. "User Manual". UniProt Knowledgebase. Archived from the original on 21 September 2005. http://www.expasy.org/sprot/userman.html#AC_line. Retrieved October 20, 2005. 
2.  This article incorporates public domain material from the National Center for Biotechnology Information document "NCBI Handbook".