The SILVA team offers an online workshop on 11 December 2025, 3pm to 5pm CET.

SILVA joined the DSMZ and the DSMZ Digital Diversity consortium at the beginning of 2023. This new affiliation is now also visible on our website. DOIs have been added for our datasets.

we are happy to announce that this year's DSMZ Digital Diversity Workshop will take place on 11 November 2024, 2 - 4 PM CET online!

The SILVA taxonomy release 138.2 is a maintenance release, with no additional sequences added to the ARB databases since the previous release 138.1. In this update we have focused on Prokaryotes.

SILVA is one of fifteen biodata resources worldwide that have been selected in the Global Biodata Coalition's 2023 selection round for Global Core Biodata Resources (GCBRs), increasing the total number of GCBRs to 52. SILVA joins its DSMZ sister databases BacDive and BRENDA (both selected in 2022) as well as LPSN (2023) as GCBR.

SILVA is looking for computer scientists as backend and web developer. Our colleagues from the DSMZ Digital Diversity integration team are also hiring for multiple positions. Find all open positions in our teams here.

Open Jobs@SILVA!

Become now part of the SILVA-team!

Scientist Molecular Taxonomy,

Softwaredeveloper backend Maven/Spring Boot,

Softwaredeveloper Web

The TestProbe, TestPrime, and ACT tools are available again as well as custom sequence exports. We continue to work on a cloud-based solution to prevent such long outages in the future. We are very sorry for the inconvenience it caused and thank you for your patience!

This news provides an overview on the latest developments regrading the SILVA project and our current hardware issues.

The de.NBI Spring School 2023 - Data Management will take place 13-17 March at the IPK Gatersleben.

We are more than proud that the de.NBI databases BRENDA and BacDive have been selected in the first set of 37 Global Core Biodata Resources!

The SILVA Team wishes you a Merry Christmas & Happy New Year. Many thanks for using SILVA and all your support to improve SILVA and SILVAngs. Looking forward to see you again in 2023.

Annual Meeting of the de.NBI Industrial Forum - de.NBI Cloud User Meeting - 2022 - BioHackathon Germany

Great news today! SILVA is now part of the integrated data platform DSMZ Digital Diversity. This cooperation will guaranty the long-term sustainability of SILVA. We are now entering a transition phase to migrate SILVA to our new host the Leibniz-Institute DSMZ-German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures, which is one of the largest biological resource centers worldwide.

This news provides an overview on the latest developments regrading the SILVA project and its taxonomy.

The SILVA Team wishes you a Merry Christmas & Happy New Year. Many thanks for using SILVA and all your support to improve SILVA and SILVAngs. Looking forward to see you again in 2022.

Main topics: A further Scientific Advisory Board conference of the de.NBI network and ELIXIR-DE, 2nd annual meeting of the de.NBI Industrial Forum, 4th de.NBI Cloud User Meeting, Women in Data Science - Perspectives in Industry and Academia II, ...and much more!

For the last 12 years, SILVA has been hosting 'The All-Species Living Tree' project (LTP). With their newest release (LTP_2020), the LTP team has decided to host the project on their own website. The SILVA team will continue to integrate the LTP taxonomy and classifications into the SILVA releases. We wish the LTP team all the best at their new home.

ELIXIR-CONVERGE releases the Research Data Management Kit, Women in Data Science – Perspectives in Industry and Academia, Establishment of the ELIXIR Germany Code of Conduct, de.NBI Cloud @ ELIXIR Compute Platform, Towards a de.NBI Plant Bioinformatics Community and much more

COVID-19 research within de.NBI and ELIXIR Germany, de.NBI Cloud, increasingly deployed for teaching, Implementing FAIR data management within de.NBI, and much more!

The SILVA Team wishes you a Merry Christmas & Happy New Year. Many thanks for staying with us in these Corona times. Looking forward to see you again in 2021.

We have updated our amplicon analysis pipeline SILVAngs to SILVA release 138.1.

SILVA 138.1 is an update of the SSU 138 full release providing corrections to the SILVA SSU taxonomy as well as updating the LSU sequence data and taxonomy to match the SSU release.

SILVAngs will be updated to 138.1 early next week.

A Happy Easter from the SILVA Team. Working hard from home to get the next SILVA update release on SSU and LSU 138 done. Stay healthy to fight COVID-19 together.

The SILVA Team wishes you a Merry Christmas & Happy New Year. Many thanks for all your feedback and support to improve SILVA and SILVAngs. Looking forward to see you again in 2020.

Finally it is done... SILVA 138 SSU is released. LSU will follow in Spring 2020. Please note: The Treeviewer and SILVAngs are still on SILVA 132. Updates are planned for January 2020. Many thanks for your patience, the next release will come faster (hopefully).

We know you all are looking forward to the release of SILVA SSU 138. We are currently in the last steps of creating the release and plan to release SILVA SSU 138 in the week of November 11. We are sorry for the additional delay and the inconveniences it may cause.

We are sorry to inform you that the SILVA Release 138 is delayed further and we have decided to release the SSU and LSU datasets separately to compensate for the delay. We estimate the SSU datasets to be available in October and the LSU datasets by the end of the year. This news article will give you some background information on the release.

As an essential step in the process to obtain a sustainable solution for the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (de.NBI), the Faculty of Technology of Bielefeld University founded the Bielefeld Institute for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (BIBI).

Read more in 17th de.NBI Quaterly Newsletter.

As partners in the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (de.NBI) project, we are proud to announce that the SILVAngs service is now running on the de.NBI scientific cloud infrastructure. A 400 CPU cluster has been set up and is providing valuable compute power for your analysis projects.

Shortly before the summer break, we provide an addendum to the latest de.NBI Quarterly Newsletter, Issue 2/19. It presents new training activities and de.NBI-supported conferences that take place in the next three months.

Check de.NBIs new quarterly newsletter! This time with articles about the de.NBI office and ELIXIR meeting, BierDEcorded project, Oliver Stegle our new associated partner and many more.

Dear SILVA community, we are very sorry, but the release of SILVA 138 will be delayed until approximately June/July 2019.

The main reason is that we had to change several of our "third-party" data providers since the providers we used were not longer up-to-date.

This caused the need for refactoring parts of the software pipeline, which took longer then expected.

We are working with high pressure on the new release.

The SILVA Team wishes you a Merry Christmas & Happy New Year. Many thanks for your support in helping us to improve SILVA and SILVAngs. Looking forward to see you again in 2019.

Content: de.NBI Industrial Forum

- New de.NBI Website

- de.NBI arcticle on Wikipedia

- de.NBI/ GFBio Summer School 2018

and much more.

UNITE (https://unite.ut.ee/) is a web-based database and sequence management environment for the molecular identification of fungi. It targets the formal fungal barcode—the nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region—and offers all 1 000 000 public fungal ITS sequences for reference.

Interactively inspect the alignment and tree of your SILVA ACT results using WASABI. You can access WASABI though a new button in the SILVA Job Manager.

The Ger­man Fed­er­a­tion for Bio­lo­gical Data (GFBio) and the Ger­man Net­work for Bioin­form­at­ics In­fra­struc­ture (de.NBI) are for the first time pro­mot­ing a joint sum­mer school to sup­port re­search­ers in man­aging their sci­entific data. 18 young sci­ent­ists met at the Braun­sch­weig Centre for Sys­tems Bio­logy.

"Rid­ing the Data Life Cycle" is the title of the sum­mer school and refers to the OECD re­com­mend­a­tion that data from pub­licly fun­ded re­search must be pub­licly…

Main Topics:

- SILVA and BRENDA are now ELIXIR Core Data Resources

- ELIXIR All Hands meeting

- ELIXIR Innovation and SME Forum

SILVA, operated by ELIXIR Germany, has today joined the list of ELIXIR Core Data Resources critically important for life science research. The ELIXIR Core Data Resources serve as a mark of the highest quality in biological data provision and stewardship and play a fundamental role in the long-term preservation of life science data.

The new version of the "All Species Living Tree" based on SILVA release 132 has been released.

Main topics: de.NBI image film at youtu.be/bV5f-Nrj58M

- Launch of usegalaxy.eu

- Training by associated partners in Kiel

- de.NBI @ conferences

The new SILVA ACT service combines alignment, search and classify as well as reconstruction of trees in a single web application.

With the next full database release which is expected for Fall 2018, the SILVA project will resign its current dual licensing model and the SILVA data sets will become free also for commercial/non-academic users.

Many thanks to the QIIME Team for providing us with the QIIME 132 release files.

Goal: raise awareness for the importance of proper research data management and to provide a practical toolbox for the acquisition, curation, documentation, archiving and publication of research data following the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable) data principles. Location: Braunschweig. Deadline for registration: 11 June 2018, but early registration will be a plus.

With the first de.NBI Quarterly Newsletter of the year 2018, it is our pleasure to announce that the second phase of the de.NBI

project will start March 2018 and will run for another two years.

The first de.NBI Quarterly Newsletter of 2018 informs also on important events of the last three months and announces ma-

jor meetings organized by de.NBI and ELIXIR.

SILVAngs has been updated to version 1.7. Improvements: fixed custom fingerprints, fixed layout problems, front page redesigned, added SILVA Twitter feed to front page, new project dashboard, several bugfixes and improvements. The SILVA Team

The SILVA Team wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Many thanks for your constructive feedback and cooperation to help us improving SILVA and SILVAngs. Looking forward to see you again in 2018.

Finally! SILVA 132 released! Highlights: Improved taxonomy and Seed, updated LTP, SILVA Treeviewer published, ARB & SILVA review published, de.NBI SILVA project extended and much more...

We are very sorry, but due to unexpected technical problems the SILVA release 132 is currently delayed. We are working with high pressure on it. Hope to get it out beginning of December. Thanks for your patience and sorry for the inconveniences. The SILVA Team.

Good news for de.NBI, the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure: In September, de.NBI has passed successfully the midterm evaluation in Berlin. The international evaluation panel stated that de.NBI is working successfully from the beginning and that it should be continued.

The UniEuk project needs your help to launch EukBank 1.0.

The Handbook is the first comprehensive document that lists the work and effort of all de.NBI partners. Content: How de.NBI is structured, Presentations of all Partners, Index of Persons/Contact Details.

SILVA TreeViewer: interactive web browsing of the SILVA phylogenetic guide trees now published in BMC Bioinformatics.

The first statistics for SILVA release 132. The SILVA 132 release can be expected for November 2017.

The next SILVA Primer 2 Paper workshop takes place from November 6 to 10 in Bremen. If you are interested please register quickly since space is limited to 11 participants.

Minimum information about a single amplified genome (MISAG) and a metagenome-assembled genome (MIMAG) of bacteria and archaea published in Nature Biotechnology

Our ARB SILVA review is now published as part of the de.NBI Special Issue: 25 years of serving the community with ribosomal RNA gene reference databases and tools.

Highlights: The integration of Germany and the de.NBI into the European life-sciences infrastructure for biological information ELIXIR has been approved. The legal integration of the de.NBI partner projects into the network has been implemented by signing a new collaboration agreement between the 30 universities and research institutes participating in the de.NBI initiative.

Core data resources for the life sciences should be supported through a coordinated international effort(s) that better ensure long-term sustainability and that appropriately align funding with scientific impact.

The Quarterly Newsletter Edition March 2017 contains information on two meetings, the 2nd Scientific Advisory Board Meeting and the de.NBI Plenary Meeting both organized last year in Berlin.

Furthermore, the newsletter deals with series of interesting topics like interactions with ELIXIR, establishment of the de.NBI cloud and organization of two de.NBI summer schools in 2017. It also contains information on events like the Midterm Review and the de.NBI Symposium.

The new version of the "All Species Living Tree" based on SILVA release 123 for LSU and 128 for SSU has been released.

Many thanks to Tony Walkers for providing us with the QIIME 128 release files.

The SILVA Team wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Many thanks for your constructive feedback and cooperation to help us improving SILVA and SILVAngs. Looking forward to see you again in 2017.

The de.NBI network started several new activities which enlarged the scope of the network significantly.

Originally the network consisted of eight service centers based on 23 individual projects which were responsible for service and training tasks of the network. On 1 November 2016 this scheme was significantly modified since 17 new partner projects joined de.NBI and nearly doubled the number of projects involved.

A further modification of the de.NBI structure was the decision to establish a…

A great first UniEuk implementation meeting in Bremen. Many thanks for joining.

A big THANK YOU to our SILVAngs Power Users for joining us in Bremen. Your input will help a lot in improving our system and services.

SILVA 128 released! Highlights: Improved taxonomy and Seed, updated LTP, SILVA Treeviewer online, UniEUK project launched and much more...

From Primer to Paper: Training in Biodiversity Analysis using NGS Amplicon Data - Application now open.

Please follow the link for more information on the course content, registration, and payment.

The first statistics for SILVA release 128. The SILVA 128 release can be expected for October 2016.

You are interested to work on an internationally renowned project outside of the classical computer science tasks? We are looking for a Web-developer or Programmer with Ideas, Expertise and Motivation to support the SILVA team.

The brand new SILVA Tree Viewer is a web application to browse and query the SILVA guide trees. A technical preview is now available for testing and feedback.

The highlight of the last three months was without doubt the ratification of the ELIXIR Consortium Agreement by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). With this step the de.NBI network is asked to prepare a node application comprising the structure of the German ELIXIR node as well as the service and training activities offered on a European level. Thus de.NBI has reached one of its most important goals namely the internationalization of its tasks.

Meet the SILVA, UniEuk and OSD Teams this week at ISME 2016 in Montreal. Listen to the lastest news and developments directly from the experts.

The ELIXIR Node in Germany will be run by de.NBI, the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure, which has been established to coordinate bioinformatics service provision across Germany.

In the first year of funding of the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (de.NBI) all members of the consortium have established with great enthusiasm a very broad spectrum of excellent bioinformatics services and training courses that are increasingly used and attended by experimental research groups. In the near future, the de.NBI staff has to deal with additional exciting challenges, for instance the integration of de.NBI partner projects and the integration of de.NBI into…

UniEuk: A Universal taxonomic framework and integrated reference gene databases for Eukaryotic biology, ecology, and evolution.

The SILVA webpage has been updated to represent the sequences of EMBL-EBI/ENA release 126. This release includes all taxonomic bugfixes done for SILVA release 123.1.

SILVA SSU 123.1 is an update of the SSU 123 full release providing corrections to the SILVA SSU taxonomy. The sequence data have not been changed.

With this 3rd de.NBI Quarterly Newsletter (Edition February 2016) we are going to celebrate the 1st anniversary of the de.NBI network, which was officially started 1 March 2015. During the last 12 months de.NBI was very active and able to reach nearly all the goals on the agenda for the first year. In particular, the Central Coordination Unit (CCU) as well as five Special Interest Groups (SIGs) have immediately been established. They structured the work carried out by the eight service centers.

The following improvements have been implemented:

1. Refactored Sequence Upload and

2. Request Project Execution

Would you like to join the SILVA/SILVAngs Team? This is your chance! Apply today!

Nice blog of Pat Schloss comparing Mothur and QIIME.

For sure we like this sentence: "[...] the greengenes alignment looks like the person was somewhat drunk at the time while the SILVA alignment looks like it was done by Germans."

The SILVA Team wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Many thanks for all your feedback and cooperation to help us improving SILVA and SILVAngs. Looking forward to see you again in 2016.

New features:

1. ORCiD authentication,

2. GZip support,

3. Dynamic Fingerprints and

4. Account deletion.

Click on the header to learn more...

Many thanks to 12 fantastic international participants who made this week a memorable experience.

The second edition of the de.NBI Quarterly Newsletter provides you the essentials on the recent and future development of the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure – de.NBI.

Registration open until Oct 23, 2015. Follow the link above for detailed information and registration.

The four-day course is an event of the Database Node of the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (de.NBI) and operated by Ribocon in collaboration with MPI Bremen and the DSMZ.

The following files have been updated since they contained errors:

• taxmap_slv_ncbi_123.txt (missing last character at the end of the organism name)
• tax_slv_ssu_123.txt (3 paths were missing)
• tax_slv_ssu_123.map (3 paths were missing)
• tax_slv_ssu_123.tree (3 leafs were missing)
• tax_slv_ssu_123.acc_taxid (137 missing IDs due to missing paths)

The missing paths/leafs:

• Zea, genus, 10127…

The new version of the "All Species Living Tree" based on SILVA release 123 has been released.

This is to welcome you all to the first edition of the de.NBI Quarterly Newsletter, which is intended to be published regularly every three months. The content of this newsletter highlights the actual and future development of de.NBI.

Done: SILVA 123 is released. Highlights: Improved taxonomy, especially for the Eukaryotes and for LSU Ref. All sequences in SILVA are classified. Exports for Megan. SSU Seed cleanup. SSU Ref and LTP can be selected in all tools on the webpage and much more...

First statistics about SILVA release 123. Release is expected in July 2015.

The new version of the "All Species Living Tree" based on SILVA release 121 has been released.

The SILVA SSU taxonomy of release 119 has been updated and is now available as 119.1 in our download section.

The SILVA webpage has been updated to represent the sequences of EMBL-EBI/ENA release 122.

Since March 1st SILVA receives funding by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research as part of the German Network of Bioinformatic Infrastructure for the next three years.

As of today we have 1001 registered users in SILVAngs. Thanks to all of you for your trust and in helping us improving the system. See you again. The SILVA Team

SILVA Researchers are working to automate the arduous task of identifying—and amending—mislabeled sequences in genetic databases.

The SILVA Team wishes you a Merry Christmas 2014 and a Happy New Year 2015.

The SILVA webpage has been updated to represent the sequences of EMBL-EBI/ENA release 121.

The new version of the "All Species Living Tree" based on SILVA release 119 has been released.

The Rocky series began twelve years ago as a regional conference, and has grown into an international program with a spotlight on regional development in the computational biosciences.

We are currently preparing SILVA release 121 as a web release. Roll-out is planned for mid of November 2014.

Finally done: SILVA 119 is released. Highlights: Improved taxonomy, especially for the Eukaryotes, all sequences in SILVA are classified, SSU Seed improved for Fungi & several bugs fixed.

The SILVA team says THANK YOU for citing us over 2000 times. We are honoured by your trust and motivated to make SILVA the best resource for rRNAs ever.

First statistics about SILVA release 119.

SILVA 119 will come as a full release. Preparation has started and we expect the release to be finished in June 2014.

Get it now, put it through its paces and tell us what you think!

The new version of the "All Species Living Tree" based on SILVA release 115 has been released.

As part of the Micro B3 bioinformatics training pipeline, SILVA and SILVAngs is introduced this week to 25 workshop participants.

Register now to get a 4 day training on how to use ARB, build reasonable phylogenetic trees, integrate SILVA in the process, etc.

The SILVA webpage has been updated to represent the sequences of EMBL-EBI/ENA release 117.

With this "digital" Christmas Tree the SILVA Team likes to say Thank You to all of our users and supporters.

Today our paper explaining the background of the SILVA and “All-species Living Tree Project (LTP)” taxonomic frameworks has been published in Nucleic Acids Research.

On December 11, 2013 the SILVA Team will present the SILVA and SILVAngs tools on the Soil Metagenomics Symposium in Braunschweig.

SILVAngs is a new data analysis service for ribosomal RNA gene (rDNA) amplicon reads from high-throughput sequencing (next-generation sequencing (NGS)) approaches.

Job opening in Bioinformatics/Programming at the Jacobs University Bremen. Deadline for applications December 6, 2013.

A nearly endless trip to get release 115 done. Highlights: Improved taxonomy, especially for the Eukaryotes, and ALL sequences in SILVA are now classified based on the SILVA taxonomy!

More than 4 Mio SSU and LSU sequences...

Preparation of SILVA release 115 has started. SILVA 115 will be a full release with updated taxonomy and trees, as well as ARB files. The release is planned for July 2013.

Talk to the ARB and SILVA developers at VAAM 2013 (10.03-13.03) in Bremen, Germany. Follow the link to see the sessions where you will find us.

Version 111 of the "All Species Living Tree" (LTP) has been released. Check the project website (link above) for more information ...

Join us at the Software Bazar at Biosystematics in Vienna, February 18-22, 2013.

If you like one - contact us. We are happy to ship them to you.

The SILVA web-databases - including all tools available on the website - were updated to EMBL-EBI release 114. The next full release will be SILVA 115.

We would like to thank the SILVA community for their comments, help, greetings and criticism. We are looking forward to A Happy New Year 2013 with you.

The SILVA-Team

The SILVA update paper has now been published in Nucleic Acids Research: "The SILVA ribosomal RNA gene database project: improved data processing and web-based tools"

The SILVA webdatabases - including all tools available on the website - were updated to EMBL-EBI release 113.

On November 8th at 6PM local German time (UTC+1) maintenance work will be performed on our computation backend.

Unforntunately for the recommended group M Archaea primer a wrong primer pair was shown. The corresponding paragraph has been corrected. Please update to the latest version of the paper.

Today we finally release a major update for TestProbe and the SINA aligner. We also refactored the way the submitted jobs are controlled by implementing a "TaskManager" and fixed some bugs to generally improve the speed and quality of service SILVA provides.

File Exports, Sequence Alignment, TestProbe and TestPrime offline from 4 PM GMT (12 PM/Noon Eastern, 6 PM Germany).

The results of the evaluation of general primers for 16S rDNA amplification have now been published in NAR. Many thanks for your support.

Taxonomic ranks mapping file for the new SILVA eukaryotic taxonomy is now ready! Please have a look at the ETWG project page for more information and for downloading the spreadsheet file.

Due to some missing data in the fields bio_material, country, pcr_primers and tax_xref_embl in the ARB datasets we updated all ARB files.

Also a new version of the non-redundant (NR) SSURef dataset based on SILVA 111 is available. Please note that you can now even restrict your searches in the web db to the current NR subset!

Finally it is done: SILVA 111 is released. 3,500,000 rRNA gene sequences and a heavily revised eukaryotic taxonomy.

TestPrime is a new tool that allows you to evaluate the performance of primer pairs by running an in silico PCR on the SILVA databases.

The 108 version of the "All Species Living Tree" has been released. Check the project website (link above) for more information ..

Adds support for computing an identity value (align_ident_slv) and identity based output filtering.

After quite a long time here is the first pre-release information for SILVA release 111.

The SINA (SILVA INcremental Aligner) paper has just been published in the journal Bioinformatics.

As published in the last issue of Laborjournal SILVA is one of the most cited papers in the last years. A big "Thank You" to all of you. It is a pleasure to work with such a great community. The SILVA Team.

SILVA release 110 skipped. Preparing now for EMBL release 111. Sorry for any inconveniences. The SILVA Team.

As some of you may have noticed from our Tweet we have updated the SILVA website this week.

Add the SILVA Barcode to your posters to update readers with the latest information from the SILVA webpage on their mobile devices.

SILVA release 110 is delayed due to unexpected technical problems. We are sorry for this. Please stay tuned, we keep you posted.

Many thanks to all SILVA users for their comments, greetings and criticism. Looking forward to work with you in 2012.

The SILVA-Team

On the VISUALIZING BIOLOGICAL DATA (VIZBI) 2012 conference series in Heidelberg a tutorial about ARB and SILVA will be given by Ralf Westram and Pelin Yilmaz. Please follow the link for details.

Sign up for a two week summer school on bioinformatics including an ARB/SILVA module.

The SILVA SSURef 108 NR 99% dataset is now available. More information can be found under Projects.

A slighly revised version of TestProbe with some new features is now availabe.

SILVA chairs a new working group called ETWG, to map Eukaryotic Taxonomy to 18S/28S rRNA sequences.

SINA is the tool we use to align our sequences. It is now finally available as a stand-alone package. Align and classify as many sequences as you want on your own computers.

The 12th workshop of the Genomic Standards Consortium will take place from 28.09.2011 to 30.09.2011 at the Max Planck Institute in Bremen. Click on the Title for details.

On Sunday the 11.09.2011 we will have an estimated downtime of 5 hours for the maintenance of our web server.

The taxonomy of the Eukaryotes has some errors. Please wait until we provide an update in the next two weeks. We are sorry for the inconveniences caused.

It gave us a hard time - but now it's done: SILVA 108 is released.

2,700,000 rRNA gene sequences and still counting...

Interested in working in the SILVA Team? Have a look at our recent job opening...

A new version of the "All Species Living Tree" has been released, based on SILVA 106. Check out the project website (link above) for more information ...

... in fall 2011! Extra session on sequence submission and related tools provided by the EBI. Register now!

Improved alignment quality, all-new sequence search and classification, detailed tutorial and more.

We have started to prepare SILVA 108. Follow the link to get a first impression of the upcoming release.

Editorial

TestProbe version 2.2 has now been released. Many thanks for your feedback. New features include the TestProbe Mismatch Overview. Check it out.

A review about the Genomic Standards Consortium has been published in PLoS Biology. GSC is the home of the MIGS/MIMS/MIMARKS (MIxS) standards.

A significantly improved version of TestProbe is now online for beta testing. We hope all performance issues have been solved. Please check and give us feedback.

After three years of discussions with almost 100 experts the new Genomic Standards Consortium checklist for marker genes MIMARKS (Minimum Information about a MARKer gene Sequence) has been published in Nature Biotechnology.

Are you using the SILVA databases with the software package ARB? Then our updated table on the ARB/SILVA memory requirements could be of interest for you ...

Due to cooling problems we had a system outage today. It is mostly solved, but some services might still be affected.

Dear SILVA-Community, many thanks for testing the new tool TestProbe. Unfornunately the amount of request has outcompeted our server capacities. We are currently working on this and hope to have the service online again at the end of this month. Sorry for the inconveniences.

Finally, we also have updated the non-redundant (NR) version of the SILVA SSU Ref dataset, now based on the SILVA 106 release. The nearly 1 million entries of the SSU Ref plus HSM/MWM datasets have been reduced to only 325k sequences using a 99% identity criterion.

TestProbe, a tool for Probe Match and Evaluation against the SILVA datasets, is now available in beta stage on the SILVA beta webpage. Please give it a try and send us feedback.

The data deluge has delayed this release. Now offering over 2.2 MILLION aligned SSU & LSU sequences!

The Genomic Standards consortium has published a paper in the ISME Journal to emphasise that the adoption of easy-to-follow standards will vastly improve our ability to interpret data from genomes, metagenomes and marker studies.

A brand new version (104) of the "All Species Living Tree" has been released. Check what's new on the project website...

Standards in sequence analysis and data reporting are becoming increasingly important. SILVA and Megx are active members of the Genomic Standards Consortium. If you want to know more, come to our next meeting at the EBI in Hinxton, UK. Registration is still open!

Exponential growth can be fascinating: Lots of new sequences - over 2 million SSUs and LSUs now!

Release of SILVA 106 is expected for mid March 2011.

We have updated the non-redundant (NR) version of the SILVA SSU Ref dataset based on the SILVA 104 release. It still contains "only" 290,603 sequence entries including the HSM project ...

The contextual (meta)data standard MIENS, issued by the Genomic Standards Consortium, has been renamed to MIMARKS (Minimum Information about a MARKer gene Sequence). The new name was created to better reflect the purpose of the standard.

Please check our updated ARB/SILVA memory requirements table to get an idea which dataset can be handled by your computer.

On December 29th between 9AM and 1PM (CET / GMT +1) custom download and alignment services will be down.

Our IT department will be using the quiet times to upgrade our firewall. In the process, the connection between the SILVA web server and our cluster will be severed. Jobs submitted or running during the maintenance window will be queued and should be processed once the firewall comes up. If you job doesn't come through, kindly resubmit it after 2 PM.

The SILVA team

Many thanks to all SILVA users for their contributions, greetings and criticism. We wish you all a nice and productive 2011.

The SILVA-Team

After two years of discussion, with more than 90 experts, the first version of the contextual (meta)data standard MIENS (Minimum Information about an ENvironmental Sequence) has been released. Please have a look and vote for it.

Finally released! Now over 1.6 MILLION aligned SSU & LSU sequences!

If you have tried to contact us by email in the last days, possibly you have received an error message. The problems are now solved and we are open again for your comments and questions. Sorry for any inconvenience!

Working hard to get it done in time...

More than 1.4 million SSU sequences...

Release is expected for beginning of October

A brand new version (102) of the "All Species Living Tree" has been released. Besides an updated 16S rRNA database a 23S rRNA database with 792 type strains is now also available

Registration open since August 17!

Back from summer break we upgraded the webpage in the backbone and frontend. Please check it out and if you find problems, tell us.

The SILVA Team wishes you a nice summer break. Stay tuned for new features coming soon.

coping with data-center meltdown

The website has been updated to release 103. The next full release will be SILVA 104.

Many thanks fro the nice comments - they are really encouraging.

145 responses in 16 days! Many thanks to all of you.

Please help us in building the next generation of SILVA by taking part in our survey. One minute of your time can change a lot.

Have a look at the table compiled by Ribocon.

A representative reference set of "only" 262k sequences!

Check our new browse and search functions. Enjoy faster downloads and a better workflow.

Finally we got it! Now over 1.4 MILLION aligned SSU & LSU sequences!

Pat Schloss compared three different rRNA alignments and SILVA has become the reference. Read more...

SILVA Release 102 with more than 1.4 million rRNAs is now scheduled for February 2010. Click on more to see the first statistics.

We thank you for your overwhelming interest in our ARB/SILVA workshops! The course was again fully booked within just 48h!

Registration is open!

Many thanks to all of you for this productive year.

The SILVA-Team

Many thanks to all of you for this productive year.

The SILVA-Team

Most of the statistics are done based on the SILVA databases.

Expected release date of SILVA 102 is February 2010

Based on SILVA release 100, 750 new typestrains have been manually curated and added to the dataset.

Search the SILVA databases with the Geographic-BLAST server, provided by megx.net. GeoBLAST allows sequence based searches and visualisation of georeferenced rRNA entries on a worldmap.

The new ARB version 5.0 has now been released. This is a major step forward and we strongly recommend that you upgrade your systems. The 64 bit version can now even handle large datasets like the SILVA SSUParc database.

Metagenomics sprang from advances in sequencing technology, and continued improvements are providing data in quantities unimaginable a few years ago. But without concerted efforts, the amount of data will quickly outpace the ability of scientists to analyze it.

A test version of Ontogrator automated text annotation and browser

service is now available for the SILVA SSU and LSU Parc datasets. The service can be used to browse rRNA sequences in a habitat context.

Over 1.2 MILLION aligned SSU & LSU sequences!

SILVA release 100 is now scheduled for beginning of August 2009.

Click on more to get the statistics.

Solved the 'pop up' issue, revised 'search' fields, fixed some bugs to enhance performance and stability.
Now working on EMBL/SILVA release 100!

Our next release will be EMBL/SILVA 100, expected for July/August.

Announcement of the the next regular ARB/SILVA workshop on short notice! It will be held August 18 - 21, 2009 in Bremen, Germany.

The data tsunami has reached us – will it also drown us?

More than 1 MILLION aligned SSU & LSU sequences!

can be found here...

The SILVA databases have been presented at the VAAM meeting in Bochum in March 2009

Within less than 48h the upcoming ARB/SILVA training was fully booked. Thank you very much for your overwhelming interest!

We have fixed the date for our next regular ARB/SILVA workshop! It will be held May 26 - 29, 2009 in Bremen, Germany.

We omitted SILVA release 97 due to problems with the EMBL release. Next update is scheduled for March 2009. Sorry for the inconveniences.

Many thanks to all users and friends for support, help and suggestions. 

Just paste a list of accession numbers in the search field to retrieve all corresponding sequences. Example: AJ579313, AJ579330, AJ704632

We have started a project on storage, handling and integration of contextual data (metadata). Learn why contextual data are of outstanding importance and which solutions we offer ....

The SILVA Team likes to say thanks to John Wooley who invited us to give a presentation about ARB and SILVA on the international Metagenomics 2008 meeting in San Diego. It was a real pleasure to see you all in sunny California.

Another 86,000 SSU and LSU rRNAs!

The results for our survey on contextual data fields (metadata) assigned to every rRNA sequence are now available on the Genomic Standards Consortium Wiki pages.

have been published in Systematic and Applied Microbiology

is now online available in Systematic and Applied Microbiology

Join the Metagenomics 2008 meeting in San Diego and learn more about SILVA and MEGX.net in the tutorials.

published online in Systematic and Applied Microbiology

The reference tree and dataset of all type strains!

800,139 SSU and LSU rRNAs!

More than 70,000 sequences added...

Starting Tuesday, June 17th at 3 PM GMT www.arb-silva.de will be off-line for approximately one hour.

Next workshop in 2009 ...

The next regular Phylogeny and ARB Workshop by Ribocon will be held from September 16 to 19, 2008 in Bremen, Germany ...

Take few minutes of your valuable time and fill in the survey...

Extensions for the ribosomal RNA are already planned, so please have a look...

Have a look at our ARB FAQs...

All old databases are now easily accessible in the archive.

Now over 700,000 rRNAs, and still counting...

Get an impression of our rRNA workshop...

from 07 to 09 April 2008 in Bremen, Germany

The paper describing the SILVA ribosomal RNA (rRNA) database project has been accepted for publication in Nucleic Acids Research. If you find SILVA a useful resource for your research or applications please cite:

Pruesse, E., C. Quast, K. Knittel, B. Fuchs, W. Ludwig, J. Peplies, and F. O. Glöckner. SILVA: a comprehensive online resource for quality checked and aligned ribosomal RNA sequence data compatible with ARB. Nucleic Acid Res. in press

The quality rating has been changed to colored bars

The new SILVA release is online now providing more than 500,000 aligned SSU and LSU sequences.

Extension: A comprehensive subsection focusing on fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) and probe design was added to the SILVA website. Both aspects, rRNA sequence databases and hybridization-mediated detection of (environmental) microorganisms are part of the 'full cycle rRNA approach' and represent two of the core competencies of the SILVA team. Detailed background information, protocols, troubleshooting, and web-based tools (in preparation) are offered.

Click here to start browsing.

The new SILVA release is now online.
Click here to see the statistics.

In preparation of the new SILVA datasets SILVA version numbers follow now EMBL release numbers.

SILVA 1.2 -> SILVA 89, SILVA 1.4 -> SILVA 89.1

Advanced search functionalities added Search page.

Links to EMBL and Publications added in Detailed view.

Webpage moved to new (faster) server.

LSURef, LSUParc and SSURef, SSUParc dbs are now available from the Download page.

An SILVA/ARB workflow has been added to FAQs.

A table describing all fields in the dbs has been added to FAQs.

After more than one year of development the SILVA webpages and the SSU database is online.  Have a look at Release Information and esp. the Known Bugs section to see what is available so far.