DOE Joint Genome Institute

  • COVID-19
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Our Science
    • DOE Mission Areas
    • Science Programs
    • Science Highlights
    • Scientists
    A vertical tree stump outdoors with about a dozen shiitake mushrooms sprouting from its surface.
    Tracing the Evolution of Shiitake Mushrooms
    Understanding Lentinula genomes and their evolution could provide strategies for converting plant waste into sugars for biofuel production. Additionally, these fungi play a role in the global carbon cycle.

    More

    Soil Virus Offers Insight into Maintaining Microorganisms
    Through a collaborative effort, researchers have identified a protein in soil viruses that may promote soil health.

    More

    Data yielded from RIViT-seq increased the number of sigma factor-gene pairs confirmed in Streptomyces coelicolor from 209 to 399. Here, grey arrows denote previously known regulation and red arrows are regulation identified by RIViT-seq; orange nodes mark sigma factors while gray nodes mark other genes. (Otani, H., Mouncey, N.J. Nat Commun 13, 3502 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-31191-w)
    Streamlining Regulon Identification in Bacteria
    Regulons are a group of genes that can be turned on or off by the same regulatory protein. RIViT-seq technology could speed up associating transcription factors with their target genes.

    More

  • Our Projects
    • Search JGI Projects
    • DOE Metrics/Statistics
    • Approved User Proposals
    • Legacy Projects
    A panoramic view of a lake reflecting a granite mountain.
    Genome Insider: Methane Makers in Yosemite’s Lakes
    Meet researchers who sampled the microbial communities living in the mountaintop lakes of the Sierra Nevada mountains to see how climate change affects freshwater ecosystems, and how those ecosystems work.

    Listen

    A light green shrub with spiny leaves, up close.
    Genome Insider: A Shrubbier Version of Rubber
    Hear from the consortium working on understanding the guayule plant's genome, which could lead to an improved natural rubber plant.

    Listen

    The switchgrass diversity panel growing at the Kellogg Biological Station in Michigan. (David Lowry)
    Mapping Switchgrass Traits with Common Gardens
    The combination of field data and genetic information has allowed researchers to associate climate adaptations with switchgrass biology.

    More

  • Data & Tools
    • IMG
    • Data Portal
    • MycoCosm
    • PhycoCosm
    • Phytozome
    • GOLD
    iPHoP image (Simon Roux)
    iPHoP: A Matchmaker for Phages and their Hosts
    Building on existing virus-host prediction approaches, a new tool combines and evaluates multiple predictions to reliably match viruses with their archaea and bacteria hosts.

    More

    Abstract image of gold lights and squares against a black backdrop
    Silver Age of GOLD Introduces New Features
    The Genomes OnLine Database makes curated microbiome metadata that follows community standards freely available and enables large-scale comparative genomics analysis initiatives.

    More

    Graphical overview of the RNA Virus MetaTranscriptomes Project. (Courtesy of Simon Roux)
    A Better Way to Find RNA Virus Needles in the Proverbial Database Haystacks
    Researchers combed through more than 5,000 data sets of RNA sequences generated from diverse environmental samples around the world, resulting in a five-fold increase of RNA virus diversity.

    More

  • User Programs
    • Calls for Proposals
    • Special Initiatives & Programs
    • Product Offerings
    • User Support
    • Policies
    • Submit a Proposal
    Green plant matter grows from the top, with the area just beneath the surface also visible as soil, root systems and a fuzzy white substance surrounding them.
    Supercharging SIP in the Fungal Hyphosphere
    Applying high-throughput stable isotope probing to the study of a particular fungi, researchers identified novel interactions between bacteria and the fungi.

    More

    Digital ID card with six headshots reads: Congratulations to our 2022 Function Genomics recipients!
    Final Round of 2022 CSP Functional Genomics Awardees
    Meet the final six researchers whose proposals were selected for the 2022 Community Science Program Functional Genomics call.

    More

    croppe image of the JGI helix sculpture
    Tips for a Winning Community Science Program Proposal
    In the Genome Insider podcast, tips to successfully avail of the JGI's proposal calls, many through the Community Science Program.

    Listen

  • News & Publications
    • News
    • Blog
    • Podcasts
    • Webinars
    • Publications
    • Newsletter
    • Logos and Templates
    • Photos
    2022 JGI-UC Merced interns (Thor Swift/Berkeley Lab)
    Exploring Possibilities: 2022 JGI-UC Merced Interns
    The 2022 UC Merced intern cohort share how their summer internship experiences have influenced their careers in science.

    More

    image from gif that shows where in the globe JGI fungal collaborators are located.
    Using Team Science to Build Communities Around Data
    As the data portals grow and evolve, the research communities further expand around them. But with two projects, communities are forming to generate high quality genomes to benefit researchers.

    More

    Cow Rumen and the Early Days of Metagenomics
    Tracing a cow rumen dataset from the lab to material for a hands-on undergraduate research course at CSU-San Marcos that has since expanded into three other universities.

    More

News & Publications
Home › News Releases › DOE JGI Produces New QC Tool for Microbial Genomes

May 24, 2010

DOE JGI Produces New QC Tool for Microbial Genomes

WALNUT CREEK, CA—More than a thousand microbial genomes have been sequenced at various sequencing centers in the past 15 years to better understand their roles in tasks ranging from bioenergy to health to environmental cleanup. Conservative estimates suggest roughly 10,000 microbial genomes will be publicly available within the next two years, but genomic standards have not caught up with the technological advances that have made the sequencing process faster and cheaper. As a result, the torrent of DNA sequences being released has varying levels of quality, which impacts researchers’ ability to use this information.

To assist in checking the quality of the microbial genomic DNA sequences generated before they are submitted to the federally funded public archive GenBank, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI) has introduced a quality control tool known as the Gene Prediction IMprovement Pipeline or GenePRIMP. GenePRIMP is described in a paper published online May 2 in Nature Methods and has the potential to become a standard in prokaryotic gene calling, a technique by which the start and end of potential gene coding sequences are identified.

First author Amrita Pati, a software developer in the DOE JGI’s Genome Biology Program noted that GenePRIMP double-checks the gene boundaries, gene annotations and unannotated intergenic regions in genome sequences after the finishing process. She credited colleague Natalia Ivanova with establishing the biological basis of the software tool and helping to refine GenePRIMP. The program, said Pati, identifies gene-calling errors such as potentially incorrect gene start and end positions, large overlaps between genes, fragmented genes and missed genes.

Amrita_Pati

Amrita Pati, DOE Joint Genome Institute

Gene-calling errors, noted Pati, can range from two percent to as much as 30 percent of the original genes identified in the genome and are dependent on many factors, such as horizontal gene transfer between species. For example, genes acquired by horizontal gene transfer could become pseudogenes (similar to genes but not coding for a gene product) and are more error-prone. Pati said GenePRIMP significantly reduces the amount of time scientists spend checking the whole genome by specifically highlighting errors that need to be manually corrected.

“Without a GenePRIMP report to work with,” she said, singling out the microbe Starkeya novella—a soil bacterium that plays an important role in regulating the cycling of carbon and sulfur—as an example, “a DOE JGI scientist would have to examine 4,480 gene models. With GenePRIMP they have to examine less than a tenth of that number of genes.” She said that the GenePRIMP report offers additional value because it already includes any anomalies found through BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), which finds regions of local similarity between sequences, so scientists don’t have to run their own BLAST search.

“With GenePRIMP we have achieved a major breakthrough in the improvement of the quality of structural annotations such as gene predictions,” said Genome Biology Program head and study senior author Nikos Kyrpides. He pointed out that using GenePRIMP offers researchers three major advantages: high quality results with reduced errors; an approach that can be used regardless of the automated software originally used to check gene annotations; and finally a method to standardize gene calling.

“There are a lot of different tools used for predicting genes in prokaryotes,” Kyrpides said. “The major problem we have is that they all produce very variable results. This impedes our ability to compare genomes sequenced and annotated from various sources, as they use different tools for gene prediction. GenePRIMP is not substituting any of the available methods; a user can employ any available automatic gene prediction method, and then use GenePRIMP to correct the initial output. It will generate a much more standardized output, thus not only significantly improving quality, but also significantly facilitating comparative analysis.”

Dawn Field, President of the Genomics Standards Consortium, an international initiative of genomics researchers interested in establishing standards for collecting and capturing genomic data to the general community, called GenePRIMP “a great solution to a long-standing problem in computational bioinformatics – how to clean up gene calls based on comparative genomic data. Ideally,” she added, “the underlying principles will pave the way for new standards in gene calling.”

Natalia_Ivanova

Natalia Ivanova, DOE Joint Genome Institute

Genomics researchers supported by a range of federal agencies and other funding sources are expected to take advantage of this new quality control tool.  The current version of the software finds and reports gene model anomalies to the scientists.  Pati said that a future version of GenePRIMP will automatically find and correct said anomalies as well as report frameshifts (genetic mutation caused by insertion or deletion of nucleotides) and pseudogenes.

“Consistent high-quality annotation on microbial genomes is key to their utility,” said Owen White, director of bioinformatics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and head of the Human Microbiome Project Data Analysis and Coordination Center that tracks, stores, analyzes and distributes the data. “Software such as GenePRIMP is an important component in our quality control toolbox.”

Pati said the automated software tool is the crystallization of manual operating procedures used for more than 3 years for correcting gene models at the DOE JGI. “As such, it is also following the principles of standardization of the Genomics Standards Consortium and further development will factor in the Consortium’s recommendations,” she and her colleagues wrote, while enabling faster, better and cheaper analyses.

Other authors on the paper are DOE JGI’s Natalia Mikhailova, Galina Ovchinnikova, Sean Hooper and Athanasios Lykidis.

A video of first author Pati explaining how GenePRIMP works is available on YouTube at http://bit.ly/bUG18f  and on SciVee at http://bit.ly/awfUiY.

The U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, supported by DOE’s Office of Science, is committed to advancing genomics in support of DOE missions related to clean energy generation and environmental characterization and cleanup.  DOE JGI, headquartered in Walnut Creek, Calif., provides integrated high-throughput sequencing and computational analysis that enable systems-based scientific approaches to these challenges. Follow DOE JGI on Twitter and Facebook.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)

The U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is committed to advancing genomics in support of DOE missions related to clean energy generation and environmental characterization and cleanup. JGI provides integrated high-throughput sequencing and computational analysis that enable systems-based scientific approaches to these challenges. Follow @jgi on Twitter.

DOE’s Office of Science is the largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.

Filed Under: News Releases

More topics:

  • COVID-19 Status
  • News
  • Science Highlights
  • Blog
  • Webinars
  • CSP Plans
  • Featured Profiles

Related Content:

You can move, but you can’t hide

Illustration of a magnifying glass identifying viruses and plasmids.

JGI announces second round of 2023 New Investigator awardees

From left to right: [above] Emma Bell, Mallory Choudoir, Sneha Couvillion, Tobin Hammer, Christina Hazard, Rachel Mackelprang, Brook Moyers, Mei, Ran,; [below] Benjamin Peterson, Dacheng Ren, Allison Rober, Neal Scott, Chikae Tatsumi, Vojtech Tlaskal, Fernando Torralbo, Luis Felipe Valdez-Nuñez

A Collaboration to Improve Plant Genome Annotations Across Species

A tiled collage of square photos of different plants - soybeans, and sorghum, for example.

From Berkeley to Binghamton: Tracking Strawberry Evolution

iPHoP: A Matchmaker for Phages and their Hosts

iPHoP image (Simon Roux)

Supercharging SIP in the Fungal Hyphosphere

Green plant matter grows from the top, with the area just beneath the surface also visible as soil, root systems and a fuzzy white substance surrounding them.
  • Careers
  • Contact Us
  • Events
  • User Meeting
  • MGM Workshops
  • Internal
  • Disclaimer
  • Credits
  • Policies
  • Emergency Info
  • Accessibility / Section 508 Statement
  • Flickr
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab Biosciences Area
A project of the US Department of Energy, Office of Science

JGI is a DOE Office of Science User Facility managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

© 1997-2023 The Regents of the University of California