Comparative Genome Annotation Systems

Abstract

Understanding the genetic content of a genome is a very important but challenging task. One of the most effective methods to annotate a genome is to compare it to the genomes that are already sequenced and annotated. This chapter is to survey systems that can be used for annotating genomes by comparing multiple genomes and discusses important issues in designing genome comparison systems such as extensibility, scalability, reconfigurability, flexibility, usability, and data mining functionality. We also discuss briefly further issues in developing genome comparison systems where users can perform genome comparison flexibly on the sequence analysis level.