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Is there an online library that includes all known genes in stored in their nucleotide form of all living organisms?

I'm presuming that such a database doesn't exist. So to kick of my search, how can I find a gene amongst all the other databases? Where is a good place to start looking for information about my gene given that it is a well studied sequence? The issue is that I have been provided with the sequence, but I just don't know what organism the sequence belongs to or what it codes for.

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Databases

There are too many databases to list here, but Wikipedia has a decent list of the genome databases. For example, there are databases dedicated to genes of individual species, like Wormbase, SGDB and countless others. Alternatively, as others mention a great place to kick off your search is the NCBI.

Finding your nucleotide sequence in databases

It sounds like you already have your sequence. If you want to see if your sequence has been found elsewhere or if there are any similar sequences, you can use BLAST from NCBI. Although it is not strictly a database in itself, it looks to align your sequence to similar sequences in external NCBI databases and quantifies the sequence similarity. It will reveal the species for you to go to a more appropriate database along with a lot of other information about the gene.

There are plenty of parameters to alter to suit your specific needs, but generally, the default settings are a great place to start analysing your gene. You'll need to run a nucleotide test since you want to find the DNA sequence. The results might be difficult to interpret.

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NCBI is a good option. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

If you're looking for a gene sequence, you can search for the gene name in the nucleotide database. For example, here is the annotated human insulin gene; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/J00265.1

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SwissProt is a human-annotated database of genes/proteins with known functions.

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    $\begingroup$ Although this does have the gene information (or at least information on where to access information on the genes) this is a protein centric database and deals in amino acid rather than nucleotide sequences. $\endgroup$
    – James
    Commented Dec 4, 2014 at 0:44
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    $\begingroup$ There is no properly annotated DNA database. Use this to find function of interest and use a tBlastn to find the gene. Alternately, BRENDA is a human-annotated enzyme database. Use tBlastn to find gene. $\endgroup$
    – Andrew
    Commented Dec 4, 2014 at 0:50
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No, you are wrong in your assumption that there is no such library.

GenBank. One-stop shop.

Blast your sequence against it on-line. If it isn’t there you are not likely to find it.

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