What is MSS? – Mass Submission System

If you are to submit raw outputs from sequencers, please read DRA; DDBJ Sequence Read Archive and DTA; DDBJ Trace Archive.

We at DDBJ recommend using Mass Submission System (MSS) when:

• the submission consists of large number of sequences.
      When number of sequences is greater than 1024, you have to submit two or more times via Nucleotide Sequence Submission System
• the complex submission containing many features (more than 30).
• the submission with long sequences (greater than 500 kb).
• the submission is not applicable for Nucleotide Sequence Submission System
     i.e. EST, STS, TSA, HTC, GSS, HTG, WGS or CON

Nucleotide Sequence Submission System is an interactive application to enter all of items required for your submission on step by step basis. When the submission contents are not so many, Nucleotide Sequence Submission System is very useful, an easy procedure for your submission. However, in case of large scale submission, such as thousands of ESTs, it is more useful to send submission files directly to DDBJ, rather than Nucleotide Sequence Submission System

MSS is a procedure for large scale submission.

Before using MSS

Before sending your data to DDBJ, please apply from MSS application form. Then, DDBJ will introduce MSS manuals and software tools to help your submission.

Submission files required for MSS

For using MSS, following two files are basically required;

Sequence file

The text file that contains all nucleotide sequences in FASTA format.

Annotation file

The tab delimited text file that contains your data other than sequences, such as submitters, references and biological features.

Since both of two files are the formatted text files, you can make the files by yourself for your submission with some scripts, spread sheet (such as MS Excel), text editors and so on.

The Flowchart of MSS

1. Application

Before sending your data to DDBJ, please apply from MSS application form. Then, DDBJ will introduce MSS manuals and software tools to help your submission.

2. Test submission

Please make samples for both of sequence and annotation files with some of your entries and send them to DDBJ by e-mail or ftp.

3. Annotation for test submission

We will annotate the test data in accordance with an international rule agreed with DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank and our own rule. We sometimes ask to revise the files if necessary.

4. Submission

Please make the correct format files which contain all data and send them to DDBJ by e-mail or ftp.

5. Annotation for submission

We will annotate the data. We sometimes ask to revise the files if necessary.

6. Accession number

We will inform an accession number to the specified 'Contact Person' by e-mail.

7. Data release or withhold

If you do not specify any "hold-date" for your submission, your data will be open to public as soon as possible.
If you specify a "hold-date", we release the data on accordance with Principle of "Hold-Until-Published" data release