Terminating contamination: large-scale search identifies more than 2,000,000 contaminated entries in GenBank
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Abstract
Genomic analyses are sensitive to contamination in public databases caused by incorrectly labeled reference sequences. Here, we describe Conterminator, an efficient method to detect and remove incorrectly labeled sequences by an exhaustive all-against-all sequence comparison. Our analysis reports contamination of 2,161,746, 114,035, and 14,148 sequences in the RefSeq, GenBank, and NR databases, respectively, spanning the whole range from draft to “complete” model organism genomes. Our method scales linearly with input size and can process 3.3 TB in 12 days on a 32-core computer. Conterminator can help ensure the quality of reference databases. Source code (GPLv3): https://github.com/martin-steinegger/conterminator
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The bacterial protein A0A1C5UEQ5 is unlikely to be a contaminant due to its contig length.
“The bacterial protein (UniProt: A0A1C5UEQ5), encoded on a contig of length 138,559 (GenBank: FMFM01000010), is unlikely to be a contaminant due to its length29.”
From Clustering predicted structures at the scale of the known protein universe (2023) · cites this paper as [29]
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- Authors
- Steinegger, M., & Salzberg, S. L.
- Affiliations
- Seoul National University (KR)
- Johns Hopkins University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Steinegger, Martin
- Venue
- Genome Biology
- Published
- 2020-05-12
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 115-115
- ISSN
- 1465-6906 (ISSN-L)
- 1474-760X
- PMC
- PMC7218494
- OpenAlex
- W3028050938
- Cited by
- 246
- References
- 34
- Citations by year
- 2026: 27 · 2025: 52 · 2024: 38 · 2023: 37 · 2022: 34 · 2021: 45 · 2020: 13
- FWCI
- 11.19
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- Genome biology (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (acceptedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Seoul National University Open Repository (Seoul National University) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (1744309, R01-HG006677)
- National Institutes of Health (HG006677)
- National Human Genome Research Institute (R01HG006677)
- National Institute of General Medical Sciences (R35GM130151)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Fractal and DNA sequence analysis
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Plant Science › Chromosomal and Genetic Variations
- Keywords
- GenBank, reference sequences, contamination detection
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Humans, Genome, Databases, Nucleic Acid, Mice, DNA Contamination
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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