An accession number, in

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combi ...

, is a unique identifier given to a DNA or

protein Proteins are large biomolecules and macromolecules that comprise one or more long chains of amino acid residues. Proteins perform a vast array of functions within organisms, including catalysing metabolic reactions, DNA replication, respo ...

sequence record to allow for tracking of different versions of that sequence record and the associated sequence over time in a single data repository. Because of its relative stability, accession numbers can be utilized as

foreign key A foreign key is a set of attributes in a table that refers to the primary key of another table. The foreign key links these two tables. Another way to put it: In the context of relational databases, a foreign key is a set of attributes subject to ...

s for referring to a sequence object, but not necessarily to a unique sequence. All sequence information repositories implement the concept of "accession number" but might do so with subtle variations.

LRG

Locus Reference Genomic (LRG) records have unique accession numbers starting with LRG_ followed by a number. They are recommended in th
Human Genome Variation Society Nomenclature guidelines
as stable genomic reference sequences to report sequence variants in LSDBs and the literature.

Notes and references

# # {{NCBI-handbook Bioinformatics