A number of individual labs or consortia are setting up (and many more are planned) large-scale sequencing efforts based on highly programmatic and/or automated approaches to determining nucleotide sequences. This development has raised a number of issues regarding the flow of nucleotide sequence data from these projects into the data banks that now serve the molecular biological community: Will journal articles still serve as the primary forum for explicit presentation (and transmission) of nucleotide sequence data? If not, how will the data get into the data banks? How will these changes in data flow affect strategies for storing and manipulating nucleotide sequence data? These issues are examined and a general strategy offered. In addition, a number of unresolved issues are discussed.