%0 Journal Article
%T Automated eukaryotic gene structure annotation using EVidenceModeler and the Program to Assemble Spliced Alignments
%A Brian J Haas
%A Steven L Salzberg
%A Wei Zhu
%A Mihaela Pertea
%A Jonathan E Allen
%A Joshua Orvis
%A Owen White
%A C Robin Buell
%A Jennifer R Wortman
%J Genome Biology
%D 2008
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/gb-2008-9-1-r7
%X Accurate and comprehensive gene discovery in eukaryotic genome sequences requires multiple independent and complementary analysis methods including, at the very least, the application of ab initio gene prediction software and sequence alignment tools. The problem is technically challenging, and despite many years of research no single method has yet been able to solve it, although numerous tools have been developed to target specialized and diverse variations on the gene finding problem (for review [1,2]). Conventional gene finding software employs probabilistic techniques such as hidden Markov models (HMMs). These models are employed to find the most likely partitioning of a nucleotide sequence into introns, exons, and intergenic states according to a prior set of probabilities for the states in the model. Such gene finding programs, including GENSCAN [3], GlimmerHMM [4], Fgenesh [5], and GeneMark.hmm [6], are effective at identifying individual exons and regions that correspond to protein-coding genes, but nevertheless they are far from perfect at correctly predicting complete gene structures, differing from correct gene structures in exon content or position [7-10].The correct gene structures, or individual components including introns and exons, are often apparent from spliced alignments of homologous transcript or protein sequences. Many software tools are available that perform these alignment tasks. Tools used to align expressed sequence tags (ESTs) and full-length cDNAs (FL-cDNAs) to genomic sequence include EST_GENOME [11], AAT [12], sim4 [13], geneseqer [14], BLAT [15], and GMAP [16], among numerous others. The list of programs that perform spliced alignments of protein sequences to DNA are much fewer, including the multifunctional AAT, exonerate [17], and PMAP (derived from GMAP). An extension of spliced protein alignment that includes a probabilistic model of eukaryotic gene structure is implemented in GeneWise [18], a popular homology-based gene predict
%U http://genomebiology.com/2008/9/1/R7