Dear GOLD users,

We have facilitated distribution of all the data from GOLD through the excel files in order to support scientists around the world who would like to get the data and perform their own analysis and eventually publish their results. We intent to continue supporting this sort of usage by providing all the data through an excel file. However, we have recently noticed an increasing number of cases where colleagues were downloading the data in order to feed the development of systems replicating GOLD's functionality. We are putting tremendous amount of effort to collect and curate the metadata for an increasing number of genomes and metagenomes. Funding for curation of biological data is very limited if at all available, therefore we cannot support funding of other systems based on the manual work we do. Accordingly, if you need the data in order to perform comparative analysis, leading to publication or even populate other dbases you may have we are happy to continue providing you the GOLD data through excel.

Many thanks

The GOLD team