A System for Integration And Management of Community Annotation for VectorBase.org

Due to the size and number of genomes that the Bioinformatic resource VectorBase.org maintains, VectorBase relies heavily on automated computational analyses for gene prediction and functional annotation. While these automated procedures provide a standardized, uniform analysis of all genomic data, the algorithms inspecting the data are often conservative and unable to provide a complete picture of a gene's structure and functionality due to our limited understanding of the relationship between a gene's sequence and its phenotypic manifestation. Alternatively, researchers working with specific genes of interest in often have a very intimate understanding of a gene's structure and functional role by way of experimental analyses. Although these per-gene investigations are numerically limited due to the time and effort entailed, the information ascertained through such experiments can be used as both a benchmark and training material for automated gene-prediction analyses in addition to simply providing trustworthy genomic annotation. Herein is presented a set of web-based data collection tools, known as The VectorBase Community Annotation Pipeline, that are designed to facilitate collection and integration of experimentally produced gene models and associated meta-data.