Metagenomics: Inferring Microbial Function

Background: The number of prokaryotic genome sequences becoming available is growing steadily and is growing faster than our ability to accurately annotate them. Description: We describe a fully automated service for annotating bacterial and archaeal genomes. The service identifies protein-encoding, rRNA and tRNA genes, assigns functions to the genes, predicts which subsystems are represented in the genome, uses this information to reconstruct the metabolic network and makes the output easily downloadable for the user. In addition, the annotated genome can be browsed in an environment that supports comparative analysis with the annotated genomes maintained in the SEED environment. The service normally makes the annotated genome available within 12–24 hours of submission, but ultimately the quality of such a service will be judged in terms of accuracy, consistency, and Published: 8 February 2008 BMC Genomics 2008, 9:75 doi:10.1186/1471-2164-9-75 Received: 12 September 2007 Accepted: 8 February 2008 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/9/75 © 2008 Aziz et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. BMC Genomics 2008, 9:75 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/9/75