Section: Software

Magus: Collaborative Genome Annotation

Participants : David James Sherman [ correspondant ] , Pascal Durrens, Tiphaine Martin.

As part of our contribution the Génolevures Consortium, we have developed over the past few years an efficient set of tools for web-based collaborative annotation of eukaryote genomes. The Magus genome annotation system (http://magus.gforge.inria.fr ) integrates genome sequences and sequences features, in silico analyses, and views of external data resources into a familiar user interface requiring only a Web navigator. Magus implements the Génolevures annotation workflow and enforces curation standards to guarantee consistency and integrity. As a novel feature the system provides a workflow for simultaneous annotation of related genomes through the use of protein families identified by in silico analyses; this has resulted in a three-fold increase in curation speed, compared to one-at-a-time curation of individual genes. This allows us to maintain Génolevures standards of high-quality manual annotation while efficiently using the time of our volunteer curators.

Magus is built on: a standard sequence feature database, the Stein lab generic genome browser [58] , various biomedical ontologies (http://obo.sf.net ), and a web interface implementing a representational state transfer (REST) architecture [39] .

See also the web page http://magus.gforge.inria.fr/ .