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A beginner's guide to eukaryotic genome annotation

Key Points

  • Sequencing costs have fallen so dramatically that a single laboratory can now afford to sequence even large genomes.

  • Genome annotation pipelines synthesize alignment-based evidence with ab initio gene predictions to obtain a final set of gene annotations.

  • The exotic nature of many of the genomes that are currently being sequenced complicates annotation efforts.

  • Genome annotation has moved beyond merely identifying protein-coding genes to include the annotation of transposons, regulatory regions, pseudogenes and non-coding RNA genes.

  • Another new challenge is the need to incorporate RNA-seq data into the annotation process.

  • Annotation quality control and management are becoming major bottlenecks.

  • Periodic updates to the annotations to every genome are necessary as new data and techniques become available.

  • Incorrect and incomplete annotations poison every experiment that makes use of them. Providing accurate and up-to-date annotations is therefore essential.

Abstract

The falling cost of genome sequencing is having a marked impact on the research community with respect to which genomes are sequenced and how and where they are annotated. Genome annotation projects have generally become small-scale affairs that are often carried out by an individual laboratory. Although annotating a eukaryotic genome assembly is now within the reach of non-experts, it remains a challenging task. Here we provide an overview of the genome annotation process and the available tools and describe some best-practice approaches.

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Figure 1: Genome and gene sizes for a representative set of genomes.
Figure 2: Three basic approaches to genome annotation and some common variations.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank P. Flicek, B. Haas, N. Jiang, D. Lipman, A. Mackey, K. Pruitt, Y. Sun and J. Stajich for reading an earlier version of this manuscript and for their many helpful suggestions. This work was supported by the US National Institutes of Health grants R01GM099939 and R01-HG004694 and by the US National Science Foundation IOS-1126998 to M.Y.

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Glossary

Genome annotation

A term used to describe two distinct processes. 'Structural' genome annotation is the process of identifying genes and their intron–exon structures. 'Functional' genome annotation is the process of attaching meta-data such as gene ontology terms to structural annotations. This Review focuses on structural annotation.

RNA-sequencing data

(RNA-seq data). Data sets derived from the shotgun sequencing of a whole transcriptome using next-generation sequencing (NGS) techniques. RNA-seq data are the NGS equivalent of expressed sequence tags generated by the Sanger sequencing method.

N50

A basic statistic for describing the contiguity of a genome assembly. The longer the N50 is, the better the assembly is. See box 1 for details.

Long interspersed nuclear elements

(LINEs). Retrotransposons that encode reverse transcriptase and that make up a substantial fraction of many eukaryotic genomes.

Short interspersed nuclear elements

(SINEs). Retrotransposons that do no encode reverse transcriptase and that parasitize LINE elements. ALU elements, which are very common in the human genome, are one example of a SINE.

Percent similarity

The percent similarity of a sequence alignment refers to the percentage of positive scoring aligned bases or amino acids in a nucleotide or protein alignment, respectively. The term positive scoring refers to the score assigned to the paired nucleotides or amino acids by the scoring matrix that is used to align the sequences.

Percent identity

The percent identity of a sequence alignment refers to the percentage of identical aligned bases or amino acids in a nucleotide or protein alignment, respectively.

Unsupervised learning methods

Refers to methods that can be trained using unlabelled data. One example is a gene prediction algorithm that can be trained without a reference set of correct gene models; instead, the algorithm is trained using a collection of annotations, not all of which might be correct.

Data-mart

Provides users with online access to the contents of a data warehouse through user-configurable queries. A data-mart allows users to download data that meet their particular needs: for example,all transcripts from all annotated genes on human chromosome 3.

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Yandell, M., Ence, D. A beginner's guide to eukaryotic genome annotation. Nat Rev Genet 13, 329–342 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg3174

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