Community involved fungal genome annotation at the JGI-LANL

The role of the fungal genome annotation team at LANL is to provide high quality manually curated annotation of fungal genomic sequence. The JGI-LANL and fungal research community are teaming up to publish a full analysis and annotation of Trichoderma reesei and Aspergillus niger chromosomes. Work on the T. reesei genome was completed earlier this year and will appear in publication in the coming months. We begin our analysis by running each genome through an automated pipeline that combines evidence-based and abintio methods. All information is displayed before manual review in the JGI’s Genome Portal, available at http://genome.jgi.doe.gov/. Utilizing a combination of the Genome Portal, local tools and the Apollo editing system each predicted gene is then manually reviewed by comparing the predicted gene to EST and mRNA sequences from the T. reesei and A. niger genomes as well as closely related species, such as Neurospora crassa, Fusarium graminarium, Magnaporthe grisea and other Apergillus species. This suite of tools allows a distributed group of annotators from the fungal research community to correct errors as necessary and enrich the automated information with comments and human annotations. All manual annotations are immediately viewable and searchable in the Genome Portal.