2005-6-14 · As announced via the GenBank newsgroup on June 15, 2000, NCBI now uses the gzip compression utility instead of the Unix "compress" utility for all GenBank files, starting with GenBank Release 119.0. Comparisons of gzip to compress for simplistic sequence data (e.g., EST, GSS, STS) yielded an additional 50% reduction in the size of a compressed file.