New Entrez Genome Released on November 9, 2011
From the announcement:
Historically the Entrez Genome data model was designed for complete genomes of microorganisms (Archaea, Eubacteria, and Viruses) and a very few eukaryotic genomes such as human, yeast, worm, fly and thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana). It also included individual complete genomes of organelles and plasmids. Despite the name, the Entrez Genome database record has been a chromosome (or organelle or plasmid) rather than a genome.
The new Genome resource uses a new data model where a single record provides information about the organism (usually a species), its genome structure, available assemblies and annotations, and related genome-scale projects such as transcriptome sequencing, epigenetic studies and variation analysis. As before, the Genome resource represents genomes from all major taxonomic groups: Archaea, Bacteria, Eukaryote, and Viruses. The old Genome database represented only Refseq genomes, while the new resource extends this scope to all genomes either provided by primary submitters (INSDC genomes) or curated by NCBI staff (RefSeq genomes).
The new Genome database shares a close relationship with the recently redesigned BioProject database (formerly Genome Project). Primary information about genome sequencing projects in the new Genome database is stored in the BioProject database. BioProject records of type “Organism Overview” have become Genome records with a Genome ID that maps uniquely to a BioProject ID. The new Genome database also includes all “genome sequencing” records in BioProject.
BTW, just in case you ever wonder about changes in identifiers causing problems:
The new Genome IDs cannot be directly mapped to the old Genome IDs because the data types are very different. Each old Genome ID represented a single sequence that can still be found in Entrez Nucleotide using standard Entrez searches or the E-utilities. We recommend that you convert old Genome IDs to Nucleotide GI numbers using the following remapping file available on the NCBI FTP site:
ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/genomes/old_genomeID2nucGI
The Genome site.