Genome re-annotation a wiki solution.docVIP

Opinion Genome re-annotation: a wiki solution? Steven L Salzberg Address: Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and Department of Computer Science, 3125 Biomolecular Sciences Building, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA. Email: salzberg@ Published: 1 February 2007 Genome Biology 2007, 8:102 (doi:10.1186/gb-2007-8-1-102) The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2007/8/1/102 ? 2007 BioMed Central Ltd Abstract The annotation of most genomes becomes outdated over time, owing in part to our ever-improving knowledge of genomes and in part to improvements in bioinformatics software. Unfortunately, annotation is rarely if ever updated and resources to support routine reannotation are scarce. Wiki software, which would allow many scientists to edit each genome’s annotation, offers one possible solution. So you think that gene you just retrieved from GenBank [1] is correct? Are you certain? If it is a eukaryotic gene, and especially if it is from an unfinished genome, there is a pretty good chance that the amino acid sequence is wrong. And humans, how it causes sickness and (sometimes) how it becomes resistant to antibiotics. For these and other reasons, the accuracy of the gene list is tremendously important. depending on when the genome was sequenced and annotated, there is a chance that the description of its function is wrong too. What is genome annotation? Before addressing the problems with annotation, I will first summarize how it is done. The process of sequencing and annotating the DNA of a bacterial species has become highly automated in recent years, but the major steps are quite similar to what was done for the very first bacterial genome, Haemophilus influenzae, in 1995 [5]. Large-scale genome sequencing has revolutionized biology over the past ten years, generating