There's tools like BLAST that can use this data to answer questions like "is there a copy of influenza virus in pig DNA". It's basically a fast fuzz search engine.
If you grab a lot of these, you can concatenate pairs of genomes, estimate ancestry distance based on compression ratio, and then produce a phylogenetic tree.
I don't really get why this has been posted? Yup genetic data is a thing that exists... That isn't all species that have been sequenced just the NCBI collection.
The NCBI has a database of annotated genome sequences. For simple organisms, these might be only a couple of MB in size. You can use their search function to look up a genome and then download it from the overview page. No need to use their FTP server.
Amusingly, the reason that NIH uses FTP, rather than HTTP, for bulk genome file transport is that because in the old, old days, one PI (professor with a grant) was running an old version of IE which couldn't download files larger than 2GB. They had a lot of trouble with file corruption and because the PI was "important" NIH hasn't really moved to an HTTP content distribution method. Mirroring the NIH FTP servers was always a huge pain.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 22.2 ms ] threadThere's tools like BLAST that can use this data to answer questions like "is there a copy of influenza virus in pig DNA". It's basically a fast fuzz search engine.
If you grab a lot of these, you can concatenate pairs of genomes, estimate ancestry distance based on compression ratio, and then produce a phylogenetic tree.
Project Rosalind (http://rosalind.info/problems/list-view/) has a series of simple programming problems related to bioinformatics.