Pannotator
Due to Next-Generation Sequence technologies, sequencing of bacterial genomes is no
longer one of the main bottlenecks in bacterial research. Therefore, the number of
new genomes deposited in public data bases continues to increase at an accelerating
rate. Among these new genomes, there are several from the same species, which were
generated for pangenomic studies. A pangenomic study allows the investigation of a
strain’s phenotype differences based on genotype differences. In order to achieve
its goals, besides having good assembly quality, it is also fundamental to guarantee
good functional genome annotation among the different strains. This process will
facilitate the identification of genes presented in all, in a few, or in a unique
strain.
In order to address these issues, we present PANNOTATOR,
a web-based, automated pipeline for the annotation of closely related genomes well
suited for pangenome studies. This tool was developed to reduce the manual work needed
to generate reports and corrections of various genome strains. One of the main features
of this tool is the fast and automatic generation of an annotation based on a gold
standard manual annotation.