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.

Hey that's great folklore! Do you have a link with more of this story?

Neat! http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/KJ137266.1

Any guidance on tutorials on how to use this? i.e. software to analyze this data?

It's called grad school ;)

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.

Project Rosalind (http://rosalind.info/problems/list-view/) has a series of simple programming problems related to bioinformatics.

You could go to one chromosome, download the .fa (fasta) file, fire up R Studio and follow this tutorial: http://a-little-book-of-r-for-bioinformatics.readthedocs.org...

Analyze it to answer what question? Happy to help.

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.

In case anyone is wondering, there is a human here: ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/genomes/H_sapiens/

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.