A collaborative venture that effectively divides up the task of collecting, updating, and storing the nucleotide sequence data reported by researchers throughout the world. It comprises three databases, which exchange information on a daily basis; these are the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in the USA, the DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ), and the Nucleotide Sequence Database of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). Information from the entire collection can be accessed via any one of the partner organizations.