RiceGAAS: An Automated Annotation System for Rice Genome

The Rice Genome Research Program (RGP) has already released more than 100 Mb of the rice genome as part of the ultimate goal of sequencing the entire genome. Annotation of the sequence data is one of the most crucial steps in genomic sequencing to allow gene discovery in a systematic and comprehensive manner. Thus we developed a high-throughput annotation system called RiceGAAS (Rice Genome Automated Annotation System) to execute a reliable and up-to-date analysis of the rice genome sequence as well as to store and retrieve the results of annotation. RiceGAAS is a web-based analysis system and provides the following features: (i) non-redundant protein and EST database search; (ii) gene prediction using several programs; (iii) integration of results from various analyses and automatic interpretation of coding region; (iv) collecting all rice genome sequences from GenBank and re-executing automatic annotation with the latest entries in reference databases; (v) a user-friendly system with graphical output of results. The system is available via http://ricegaas.dna.affrc.go.jp/.