GenColors: Annotation and comparative genomics made easy

GenColors is a web-based software/database system initially aimed at an improved and accelerated annotation of prokaryotic genomes making extensive use of genome comparison (Romualdi et al., Bioinformatics 2005; Romualdi et al., Methods Mol. Biol. 2007). It offers a seamless integration of data from ongoing sequencing projects and annotated genomic sequences obtained from GenBank. With GenColors dedicated genome browsers containing a group of related genomes can be easily set up and maintained. The tool has been efficiently used for sequenceing and annotating the Borrelia garinii genome and is currently applied to a number of other ongoing genome projects on Legionella, Pseudomonas and E. coli genomes. Examples for freely accessible GenColors-based dedicated genome browsers are the Spirochetes Genome Browser SGB ("sgb.fli-leibniz.de":http://sgb.fli-leibniz.de), the Photogenome Browser CGB ("cgb.fli-leibniz.de":http://cgb.fli-leibniz.de) and the Enterobacter Genome Browser ENGENE ("engene.fli-leibniz.de":http://engene.fli-leibniz.de). The system has now been adapted to handle also eukaryotic genomes. A first application of this feature is the annotation and analysis of two fungal species (unpublished). Another GenColors-based tool is the Jena Prokaryotic Genome Viewer - JPGV ("jpgv.fli-leibniz.de":http://jpgv.fli-leibniz.de). Contrary to the dedicated browsers it offers information on almost all finished bacterial genomes. Currently, it includes 1140 genomic elements of 293 species.