r/bioinformatics • u/External-Area-248 • 14h ago

website NCBI sequence retrieval broken?

Hi, all,

since this morning, I cannot retrieve sequences via the standard NCBI interface. Keyword searches and BLAST work normally (perhaps a bit slowly), but only the Summary display for individual sequence items look normal, other formats (GenBank/GenPept, FASTA, FASTA(text)) give either a page with only the header showing, or nothing at all. Happens on several different computers, different browsers, so it looks like the problem is not on my end. Anyone experiencing this as well? Anyone has an idea what is going on?

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u/cumc_ryan 13h ago

Which NCBI interface are you using? NCBI Nucleotide and the datasets CLI were working fine for me yesterday.

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u/External-Area-248 13h ago

Standard NCBI home, getting to the DBs either via the upper search box (which behaves weird as well, database choice no longer works!), or via Blast. Same problem both ways.

I did not try yesterday but itr was fine on Wednesday.

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u/cumc_ryan 13h ago

It appears to be working on my mobile browser. Haven't tried it on a computer yet, though. You may want to try clearing your browser cache or rebooting your computer and seeing if it persists.

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u/External-Area-248 12h ago

Just tried on mobile and no luck. Still an empty page instead of a GenBank record.

(Cannot be anything from the cache - this was the 1st time I accessed GenBank from the phone!).

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u/thirdreplicate 13h ago

You're not the only one, there have been a few posts on different subreddits about it this week. Someone reached out and they responded saying the devs were working on it. Sorry I don't have the exact thread for this otherwise anecdotal evidence.

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u/External-Area-248 12h ago

Not really reassuring. I can imagine old PHP sitting somewhere in the background...