Yesterday (Jan. 17) the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute announced that its World Trace Archive database had just crossed the 1 billion sequence mark.

The Trace Archive is a collection of sequence reads, traces, and metrics from the world's sequencing facilities. It measures some 22 Terabytes in size and is doubling every 10 months, according to the press release. "To grasp how much data is in the Archive, if it were printed out as a single line of text, it would stretch around the world more than 250 times. Printing it out on pages of A4 would produce a stack of paper two-and-a-half times as high as Mount Everest."

This milestone comes mere months after the NCBI announced GenBank's surpassing 100 billion nucleotides, and nearly five years to the day since the publication of the human genome papers -- an anniversary we at The Scientist will be celebrating in our February issue.