{"schemaVersion":1,"generatedAt":"2026-07-20T09:39:07.064Z","asOf":"2026-07-20","license":"Compiled aggregate counts (facts) re-served by SeqDesk under each source's terms; CC-BY for UniProt & AlphaFold. See https://seqdesk.org/data for full source list & licensing. Provided as-is, no warranty.","categories":{"sequence-archives":"Sequence archives","structures-proteins":"Structures & proteins","datasets-dois":"Datasets, DOIs & repositories","omics-specialized":"Omics & specialized archives","standards-vocab":"Standards & vocabularies","fair-literature":"FAIR adoption & literature","earth-environment":"Earth & environment","physics-materials":"Physics, space & materials","chemistry-compounds":"Chemistry & compounds","biodiversity":"Biodiversity & specimens","clinical-biomed":"Clinical & biomedical","open-data":"Open data & repositories","metadata-completeness":"Metadata & completeness","sequencing-technology":"Sequencing technology"},"licensing":{"summary":"Figures here are compiled aggregate counts — single totals updated weekly from public archives and cached by SeqDesk. They are facts, not reproductions of the underlying records. Each carries its source and retrieval date and is provided “as is” with no warranty. SeqDesk is independent and not endorsed by any listed organization.","providers":[{"name":"NCBI / U.S. National Library of Medicine","scope":"SRA, GenBank, RefSeq, ClinVar, dbSNP, Taxonomy, NCBI Datasets, NCBI Virus, GEO","license":"US-gov public domain · no use/distribution restrictions","url":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/home/about/policies/"},{"name":"EMBL-EBI","scope":"ENA, BioSamples, BioStudies/ArrayExpress, Europe PMC, MGnify, OLS/ENVO, ENA checklists","license":"EMBL-EBI Terms of Use · CC0-aligned","url":"https://www.ebi.ac.uk/about/terms-of-use/"},{"name":"UniProt Consortium","scope":"UniProtKB, Swiss-Prot, TrEMBL, InterPro, Pfam","license":"CC BY 4.0 (attribution required)","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"},{"name":"RCSB PDB / wwPDB","scope":"released structures","license":"CC0 1.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/"},{"name":"AlphaFold DB (Google DeepMind / EMBL-EBI)","scope":"predicted structures","license":"CC BY 4.0 (attribution required)","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"},{"name":"OpenAlex (OurResearch)","scope":"works, dataset works, FAIR-paper citations","license":"CC0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/"},{"name":"DataCite & Crossref","scope":"dataset DOIs, total DOIs","license":"CC0 (metadata)","url":"https://datacite.org/"},{"name":"Zenodo · OSF · Dryad · re3data","scope":"records, projects, datasets, repositories","license":"open terms · counts are facts","url":"https://zenodo.org/"},{"name":"bioRxiv/medRxiv · OBO Foundry · GSC MIxS","scope":"preprints, ontologies, MIxS terms","license":"open / CC","url":"https://www.biorxiv.org/"},{"name":"GBIF · OBIS · iNaturalist","scope":"biodiversity occurrences, datasets, observations","license":"CC0 / CC BY per record · counts are facts","url":"https://www.gbif.org/terms"},{"name":"NCBI PubChem · ClinicalTrials.gov (NLM)","scope":"compounds, substances, bioassays, registered trials & results","license":"US-gov public domain","url":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/home/about/policies/"},{"name":"CDS Strasbourg · ESA Gaia · NASA/IPAC","scope":"SIMBAD, VizieR, Gaia DR3, Exoplanet Archive, EOSDIS CMR","license":"CC BY 4.0 / Gaia licence / US-gov open","url":"https://cds.unistra.fr/"},{"name":"CERN (Open Data · INSPIRE-HEP)","scope":"physics records & open datasets","license":"CC0 / open","url":"https://opendata.cern.ch/"},{"name":"Materials Project · OQMD · NOMAD","scope":"computational materials (OPTIMADE)","license":"CC BY 4.0","url":"https://materialsproject.org/about/terms"},{"name":"PANGAEA · ESGF (WCRP CMIP6)","scope":"Earth & climate datasets","license":"CC BY (per dataset)","url":"https://www.pangaea.de/"},{"name":"EMBL-EBI ChEMBL · ChEBI · GWAS Catalog · ENCODE · NeuroMorpho.Org","scope":"chemistry, ontologies, associations, experiments, neuron morphologies","license":"CC BY / open","url":"https://www.ebi.ac.uk/about/terms-of-use/"},{"name":"Harvard Dataverse · figshare · data.europa.eu · World Bank","scope":"cross-domain datasets & development indicators","license":"open terms · counts are facts","url":"https://dataverse.harvard.edu/"},{"name":"NHGRI (National Human Genome Research Institute)","scope":"DNA sequencing cost data (cost per genome, cost per Mb)","license":"U.S. Government work / public domain (cite NHGRI)","url":"https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/DNA-Sequencing-Costs-Data"}]},"count":1,"metrics":[{"id":"longest-read-length","label":"Longest sequencing read length","category":"sequencing-technology","source":"SeqDesk — compiled from literature & vendor data","unit":"bp","tier":"secondary","flagship":false,"cadence":"curated","scale":"log","fetch":{"url":"","method":"GET","parse":{"type":"manual"},"auto":false,"appendPolicy":"manual"},"release":null,"headline":{"value":"882 kb","unit":"longest read · nanopore 2018"},"forecast":false,"series":[["1977-01-01",500],["1995-01-01",900],["2008-01-01",900],["2011-01-01",10000],["2014-01-01",64500],["2018-01-01",882000]],"note":"The longest read length practically achievable each year, log scale — and a counter-intuitive story. Sanger reads reached ~500 bp (1977) to ~900 bp (capillary, 1990s) and stayed the ceiling for a decade: when next-generation sequencing arrived it traded length for throughput, so the newest 2006-2010 instruments produced SHORTER reads (Illumina ~35 bp, 454 ~400 bp) than 1977 Sanger — the flat plateau here. Long reads then exploded: PacBio RS ~10 kb (2011), PacBio RS II ~64.5 kb in a published dataset (2014), and an ultra-long Oxford Nanopore read of ~882 kb (2018) — roughly 1,000x beyond Sanger. Several points are dataset maxima or practical ceilings rather than guaranteed specs. Not forecast: read length is platform-defined, not a smooth trend.","sources":[{"label":"PacBio — SMRT sequencing history","url":"https://www.pacb.com/blog/the-evolution-of-dna-sequencing-tools/"},{"label":"Oxford Nanopore — history & ultra-long reads","url":"https://nanoporetech.com/about/history"}],"events":[{"date":"1977-01-01","label":"Sanger method","detail":"Sanger chain-termination sequencing (1977); early reads a few hundred bases, rising to ~900 bp with capillary instruments."},{"date":"2006-01-01","label":"NGS reads got shorter","detail":"The Solexa/Illumina Genome Analyzer (2006) read only ~35 bp — a deliberate step DOWN from Sanger, trading length for massive parallelism. Long-read length would not recover for years."},{"date":"2011-01-01","label":"Long reads arrive","detail":"PacBio RS (2011) brought multi-kilobase single-molecule reads, reversing the downward trend and enabling genome assembly across repeats."},{"date":"2018-01-01","label":"Ultra-long nanopore","detail":"An ~882 kb Oxford Nanopore read (2018) pushed the ceiling roughly three orders of magnitude beyond Sanger, unlocking telomere-to-telomere assembly."}]}]}