How to download a large number of protein.faa.gz files from NCBI's FTP site in one go

Question

[beginner123]

Does anyone know if it is possible to get protein.faa.gz file from NCBI FTP site by using efetch (https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/efetch.fcgi)?

The file can be downloaded from 【protein】link shown in the image, but I have to download over 100 sequences.

Answer 1

[vkkodali_ncbi]

To download a large number of protein FASTA files at the genome scale, you should use NCBI Datasets. You can use the web interface to search for a taxonomic group of interest, choose the scope of genomes and pick specific files of interest and download them all in one go. There's a command-line tool and an API that you can use in your own scripts.

Answer 2

[GenoMax]

Prior answers of interest:
How to extract Refseq of downloaded files from NCBI
How to download genome assemblies from NCBI with a list of GCA identifiers? (change the .fna file to .faa)
NCBI datasets bulk protein fasta download (if you used datasets then the solution here may be needed to rename files)

[beginner123]

Thank you vkkodali_ncbi and GenoMax ! I successfully downloaded the file via NCBI Datasets. Next, I need to change the GCA_ style annotations to NC_ annotations in order to create a reference list of RefSeq (NC_). I have a tab-separated list of GCA_ downloaded from NCBI Datasets.