Extract text from DNA sequence files (GENBANK)
To convert GENBANK sequences to another format, you need NCBI BLAST or other Data software.
To convert other file formats to the "Bioinformatics Data File" file type, you need software like NCBI BLAST or a similar tool.
The .genbank file format stores DNA, RNA, or protein sequence data alongside rich biological annotations. Developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), this plain-text format is the standard for submissions and downloads from the GenBank database.
The main disadvantage of the .genbank format is its highly rigid, nested plain-text layout. It contains detailed metadata, including feature tables, translations, and publication references. This makes the files incredibly dense and difficult to read without specialized bioinformatics software like SnapGene or Benchling. While general-purpose text editors can technically open them, manually parsing the multi-line feature tables is highly impractical for human readers. Furthermore, many modern sequence alignment tools strictly accept the simpler FASTA format, forcing researchers into a frustrating conversion bottleneck.
Users typically convert .genbank files to FASTA for basic sequence alignment. Note that converting to FASTA will permanently drop all biological annotations and metadata. Alternative targets include GFF or GTF for feature tracking, or CSV to analyze metadata in a standard spreadsheet.
This file format is difficult to open or convert using standard online tools. Standard document converters fail because they lack the specialized parsing libraries required to separate the nucleotide sequence from the complex biological annotations, often resulting in corrupted output. Fortunately, convert.guru offers a practical workaround. Just drag and drop your file to identify the format, view its raw text contents safely, and convert it when our analysis detects a supported bioinformatics structure.
Convert.Guru analyzes your GENBANK file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted GB, GBK, SOR, FASTA, GFF, GFF3 and BED files.
If you want to convert GENBANK file to FASTA, GFF, GFF3, BED, CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI or CFG, you can use NCBI BLAST or similar software from the "Genetic Sequence Storage" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to GENBANK, try NCBI BLAST or another comparable tool in the "Genetic Sequence Storage" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our GENBANK converter.