GenBank Sequences

Browse NCBI GenBank genetic sequences for Melastomataceae, including ITS, rbcL, matK and other loci used in molecular phylogenetic research.

This database indexes 12,112 nucleotide sequences from NCBI GenBank for the family. Each record shows the species it was submitted under, the locus, the accession number, the sequence length and the date of submission, and links through to the original GenBank entry.

Which loci are represented

Coverage is uneven, and that unevenness is itself informative. The nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) is the most widely sequenced marker in the family because it was the workhorse of species-level studies from the 1990s onward. The plastid loci rbcL and matK dominate higher-level work, while trnL-trnF and ndhF appear in older phylogenetic datasets. Whole plastomes are the fastest-growing category as sequencing costs have fallen.

How sequences are attributed

A sequence is attached to a species only from the organism field of the GenBank record. We do not infer attribution from the publication a sequence is associated with, because the name under which a sequence was submitted is not always the name currently accepted for that taxon. Where a name has since been synonymised, the record appears under the accepted name with the original spelling preserved in the accession metadata.

Using these sequences

The sequence viewer and the alignment tools on this site are built for exploratory work — checking what exists for a genus before designing a study. For anything that will be published, retrieve the records from GenBank directly so that you cite the accession and not this interface.

Where the data comes from

Accepted names and authorship are reconciled against Plants of the World Online (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew) and Tropicos (Missouri Botanical Garden). Occurrence records come from GBIF. DNA sequences come from NCBI GenBank. Conservation assessments come from the IUCN Red List, and publication metadata from Crossref. Every record keeps its original identifier so it can be traced back to the dataset it came from.

Read the full data sources and curation methodology for the field-by-field breakdown, the refresh schedule and the known limits of the data.