NCBI as registry

[saskiad]

NBCI contains a number of different databases. We use their "Taxonomy" for our species identifier and we will use GenBank, the "nucleotide" database, for the gene ascension number for oligo/HCR probes. I think we might need to specify these more specifically than "NCBI" because there are several databases and I don't know that each ID is completely unique. E.g. a gene ascension number yields me 1 result in the nucleotide database, and 3 results in the protein database - and the proteins make sense for the nucleotide sequence (from what I can tell). It's not clear to me that this is the ID for those proteins, or if the protein record is referencing the nucleotide... So it's possible that it is a unique ID.

But, should we distinguish these databases in our Registry list? If so, how?