Comparative Annotation Toolkit (CAT)—simultaneous clade and personal genome annotation
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Abstract
The recent introductions of low-cost, long-read, and read-cloud sequencing technologies coupled with intense efforts to develop efficient algorithms have made affordable, high-quality de novo sequence assembly a realistic proposition. The result is an explosion of new, ultracontiguous genome assemblies. To compare these genomes, we need robust methods for genome annotation. We describe the fully open source Comparative Annotation Toolkit (CAT), which provides a flexible way to simultaneously annotate entire clades and identify orthology relationships. We show that CAT can be used to improve annotations on the rat genome, annotate the great apes, annotate a diverse set of mammals, and annotate personal, diploid human genomes. We demonstrate the resulting discovery of novel genes, isoforms, and structural variants—even in genomes as well studied as rat and the great apes—and how these annotations improve cross-species RNA expression experiments.
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Comparative genomics analyses (species-tree inference, comparative annotation, selection detection) require genome alignments.
“Comparative genomics analyses, including species-tree inference7,8, comparative annotation9,10, and selection detection11,12, require genome alignments.”
From Progressive Cactus is a multiple-genome aligner for the thousand-genome era (2020) · cites this paper as [9]
Alignments of such assemblies are essential for annotation and variant characterization.
“Alignments of such assemblies are essential for annotation9 and variant characterization42 and should prove useful for reference-free pangenome construction of the variation present in a population43.”
From Progressive Cactus is a multiple-genome aligner for the thousand-genome era (2020) · cites this paper as [9]
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Near-optimal probabilistic RNA-seq quantification
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- Authors
- Fiddes, I. T., Armstrong, J., Diekhans, M., Nachtweide, S., Kronenberg, Z. N., Underwood, J. G., Gordon, D., Earl, D., Keane, T., Eichler, E. E., Haussler, D., Stanke, M., & Paten, B.
- Affiliations
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute (US)
- Universität Greifswald (DE)
- University of Washington (US)
- European Bioinformatics Institute (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Paten, Benedict
- ORCID
- Venue
- Genome Research
- Publisher
- Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Published
- 2018-06-08
- Volume
- 28
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- 1029-1038
- ISSN
- 1088-9051 (ISSN-L)
- 1549-5469
- PMC
- PMC6028123
- OpenAlex
- W2952306768
- Cited by
- 120
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 16 · 2025: 19 · 2024: 24 · 2023: 13 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 11 · 2019: 7 · 2018: 7
- Type
- posted content
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Genome Research (publishedVersion)
- bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (acceptedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- HighWire Press Open Archive (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- US National Institutes of Health (U24HG009081, U41HG007635, HG007990, HG007234)
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Plant Science › Chromosomal and Genetic Variations
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Bioinformatics and Genomic Networks
- Keywords
- genome annotation, orthology, de novo genome assembly, rat genome, great apes, mammalian genomes, personal genome, novel genes, protein isoforms, structural variants
- MeSH terms
- Algorithms, Animals, Humans, RNA, Genome, Human, Rats, Molecular Sequence Annotation, High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing
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