Genome Channel and Genome Annotation Consortium

摘要

Human and model organism sequencing projects will soon be producing data at a rate which will require new methods and infrastructure for users to be able to effectively view and understand the data. A multi-institutional project was recently funded to provide large-scale analytical processing capabilities and the authors present the results of several pilot efforts related to this project. The goals of the project are as follows: provide an environment where annotation can be constructed based on multiple interoperable analysis tools and significant available computing power; provide an environment where characterization of long genomic sequence regions can be facilitated and analysis can maintained and updated over time; provide an interactive graphical environment where predictions, features and evidence from many tools can be combined by users into high-quality annotation and visualized by the community; provide high-throughput automated analysis methods which can be configured by genome centers for their use in constructing annotation and facilitating data submission; provide high-quality annotation to large genomic sequence regions which would otherwise go unannotated; and provide the community with the best sequence level view of genomes possible. The components of this system are a number of services, a broker that oversees the distribution and management of tasks and a data warehouse, with services implemented using distributed object technology. Multiple gene prediction is accomplished using several gene finding tools including the GRAIL-EST system and gene annotation from databases such as Genbank is also captured. The data warehouse supporting the Genome Channel view is updated daily by automated Internet agents and event triggers which facilitate analysis procedures.