Software:
CGL
CGL is a software library designed to facilitate the use of genome annotations as substrates for computation and experimentation; we call it "CGL", an acronym for Comparitive Genomics Library, and pronounce it "Seagull". The purpose of CGL is to provide an informatics infrastructure for a laboratory, department, or research institute engaged in the large-scale analysis of genomes and their annotations.
MAKER (updated 8-19-2008)
MAKER is a portable and easily configurable genome annotation pipeline. It's purpose is to allow smaller eukaryotic genome projects to independently annotate their genomes and to create genome databases. MAKER identifies repeats, aligns ESTs and proteins to a genome, produces ab-initio gene predictions and automatically synthesizes these data into gene annotations having evidence-based quality values. MAKER is also easily trainable: outputs of preliminary runs can be used to automatically retrain its gene prediction algorithm, producing higher quality gene-models on seusequent runs. MAKER's inputs are minimal and its ouputs can be directly loaded into a GMOD database. They can also be viewed in the Apollo genome browser; this feature of MAKER provides an easy means to annotate, view and edit individual contigs and BACs without the overhead of a database. MAKER should prove especially useful for emerging model organism projects with minimal bioinformatics expertise and computer resources.
RepeatRunner
RepeatRunner is a CGL-based program that integrates RepeatMasker with BLASTX to provide a comprehensive means of identifying repetitive elements. Because RepeatMasker identifies repeats by means of similarity to a nucleotide library of known repeats, it often fails to identify highly divergent repeats and divergent portions of repeats, especially near repeat edges. To remedy this problem, RepeatRunner uses BLASTX to search a database of repeat encoded proteins (reverse transcriptases, gag, env, etc...). Because protein homologies can be detected across larger phylogenetic distances than nucleotide similarities, this BLASTX search allows RepeatRunner to identify divergent protein coding portions of retro-elements and retro-viruses not detected by RepeatMasker. RepeatRunner merges its BLASTX and RepeatMasker results to produce a single, comprehensive XML-based output. It also masks the input sequence appropriately. In practice RepeatRunner has been shown to greatly improve the efficacy of repeat identifcation. RepeatRunner can also be used in conjunction with PILER-DF - a program designed to identify novel repeats - and RepeatMasker to produce a comprehensive system for repeat identification, characterization, and masking in the newly sequenced genomes.