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This page last modified: Sep 03 2009
keywords:ncbi,nlm,nih,blast,format,file,extension,type,gene,protein,genome,table,report,download
description:A brief description of file extensions and file formats found at the National Center for Biotechnology Information
title:NCBI file extensions


I can't find this info anywhere on the National Center for
Biotechnology Information (NCBI) web site, but their help desk people
cheerfully filled me in on each of the file formats associated with
the various file name extensions.

If you find more file formats at NCBI, please email me and I'll
happily update this list. Please use my contact form:

http://laudeman.com/tom_mail/wmail.pl

I'm still a bit unclear on a few of those file types such as "protein
table" or a "summary report". I also suspect that these are not
canonical names. You may find that these file types go by other
descriptions. Computer people are not slaves to convention, and
biologists more so.

For more details, contact the NCBI help desk:

info@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov


.asn	genome record in asn.1 format 
.faa	protein sequences in fasta format, text file
.ffn	protein coding portions of the genome segments
.fna	genome fasta sequence
.frn	rna coding portions of the genome segments
.gbk	genome in genbank file format 
.gff	genome features
.ptt	protein table
.rnt	rna table
.rpt	summary report
.val	binary file (genome project?)

Other extensions, and my understanding of their meaning:

.gb     Genbank?
.gpff   Genbank protein


Other common extensions you may see at NCBI:

.tar    TAR archive, a common Linux archive file format. 
.gz     gzip, a compressed format. Not the same as .zip
.tar.gz gzipped tar, usually a tar file that was subsequently gzipped
.tgz    gzipped tar, usually gzipped by the tar application
.zip    Zip