The Aspergillus Genome Database: multispecies curation and incorporation of RNA-Seq data to improve structural gene annotations.

Nucleic Acids Res
Authors
Keywords
Abstract

The Aspergillus Genome Database (AspGD; http://www.aspgd.org) is a freely available web-based resource that was designed for Aspergillus researchers and is also a valuable source of information for the entire fungal research community. In addition to being a repository and central point of access to genome, transcriptome and polymorphism data, AspGD hosts a comprehensive comparative genomics toolbox that facilitates the exploration of precomputed orthologs among the 20 currently available Aspergillus genomes. AspGD curators perform gene product annotation based on review of the literature for four key Aspergillus species: Aspergillus nidulans, Aspergillus oryzae, Aspergillus fumigatus and Aspergillus niger. We have iteratively improved the structural annotation of Aspergillus genomes through the analysis of publicly available transcription data, mostly expressed sequenced tags, as described in a previous NAR Database article (Arnaud et al. 2012). In this update, we report substantive structural annotation improvements for A. nidulans, A. oryzae and A. fumigatus genomes based on recently available RNA-Seq data. Over 26 000 loci were updated across these species; although those primarily comprise the addition and extension of untranslated regions (UTRs), the new analysis also enabled over 1000 modifications affecting the coding sequence of genes in each target genome.

Year of Publication
2014
Journal
Nucleic Acids Res
Volume
42
Issue
Database issue
Pages
D705-10
Date Published
2014 Jan
ISSN
1362-4962
URL
DOI
10.1093/nar/gkt1029
PubMed ID
24194595
PubMed Central ID
PMC3965050
Links
Grant list
R01 AI077599 / AI / NIAID NIH HHS / United States