MetaTISA: Metagenomic Translation Initiation Site Annotator for improving gene start prediction

SUMMARY We proposed a tool named MetaTISA with an aim to improve TIS prediction of current gene-finders for metagenomes. The method employs a two-step strategy to predict translation initiation sites (TISs) by first clustering metagenomic fragments into phylogenetic groups and then predicting TISs independently for each group in an unsupervised manner. As evaluated on experimentally verified TISs, MetaTISA greatly improves the accuracies of TIS prediction of current gene-finders. AVAILABILITY The C++ source code is freely available under the GNU GPL license via http://mech.ctb.pku.edu.cn/MetaTISA/.