Correction to: Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/nature24286, published online 11 October 2017.

In this Review, the year of publication of reference 54 should be 2005, not 2015. In Box 2, “1982: GenBank (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/statistics/)” should read “1982: Genbank/ENA/DDBJ” and “2007: NCBI Short Read Archive” should read “2007: NCBI and ENA Short Read Archives”; this is because the launches of these American, European and Japanese databases were coordinated. These errors have not been corrected.