Quality control is a major topic for many of the databases we talked about, such
ID: 134694 • Letter: Q
Question
Quality control is a major topic for many of the databases we talked about, such as GenBank.
How do these databases maintain quality control? What kind of errors usually occur? Does anyone check the entries?
Do some research on the topic and write a short assay (1 page max) on the topic. A good place to start would be the databases themselves. So go to GenBank and poke around to see if they mention anything about quality control (Hint: Look at the pagesdescribing sequence submissions). Also you can do a PubMed search and look for papers addressing this topic.
Please make sure you correctly cite all the sources of information you provide.
Explanation / Answer
It is very critical that the database that is kept in the Genbank and other high end database be of high quality without errors. The databases contain huge amount of information and it is important to check the quality properly to minimize the errors. The quality can be controlled and maintained by checking the data thoroughly before its submission.
The sequence and data that is submitted to the databases are checked thoroughly using different ways. As soon as the data is received, an expert examines the originality and accuracy of the data and assigns an accession number to the sequence. This is followed by multiple quality assurance tests before being used for public view. Some of the errors even sprout from entry errors and it might be committed by the experts who enter the data into the database. The original source can also contain entry errors and some errors can also sprout out of the experiments that are not accurately performed and done. Once a particular error is made and it is overlooked, it can easily be propagated spreading false information.
It is thus important that there is high quality control and check so that the errors can be corrected. There are ways to fix the errors by following strategic quality control methods and rules. It is extremely important that the quality check and correction is performed and done immediately during the point of entry of the data or the information.
The quality control and check can only be performed by experts and experienced individuals. This makes it important that there must be trained curators and annotators who help with accurate entry of the data. The data is entered by the researcher but the accuracy and quality is checked by trained annotator. This requires complete check along with entering the metadata, features and all sorts of annotations. The trained annotators must work with all focus and concentration so that the data entered is of high quality, low in error and highly uniform.