Expansion and Integration of the IGS Annotation Engine

描述(申请人提供)：最近，由于第二个(甚至第三个和第四个)的吞吐量、简单化和可负担性的增加，测序成本大幅下降 代测序技术，导致较小的测序设施的爆炸性增长。然而，尽管序列产生的速度增加了，但对支持高质量序列处理和分析的计算资源的访问并没有相应地增加。注释引擎已经有效地为社区提供了四年的原核注释服务；然而，研究人员的分析需求现在远远超过了原核基因组注释。在这项工作中，我们计划大幅扩展我们服务中提供的分析管道，以包括序列组装、比较基因组学和转录组分析。这将导致Annotation引擎演变为分析引擎。此外，我们还将提高我们的工具与其他流行的生物信息学工具的互操作性。最后，我们将积极开展外联和培训。这一系列活动预计将使研究人员能够迅速进行对公众健康至关重要的分析，并在药物靶向、诊断标记和基因分型、传染病控制、对病原体爆发的快速反应和疫苗开发等领域产生重大影响。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Recently, sequencing costs have dropped sharply due to increased throughput, simplification, and affordability of second (or even third and fourth) generation sequencing technologies, leading to an explosion of smaller sequencing facilities. However, despite the increased rate of sequence generation, there has not been a commensurate increase in access to computational resources to support high-quality sequence processing and analysis. The Annotation Engine has been effective in providing prokaryotic annotation services to the community for four years; however the analysis needs of researchers now far exceed prokaryotic genome annotation. In this work we plan to substantially expand the analysis pipelines offered in our service to include sequence assembly, comparative genomics, and transcriptome analysis. This will result in the evolution of the Annotation Engine into the Analysis Engine. Furthermore, we will also increase the interoperability of our tools with other popular bioinformatics tools. Finally, we will engage in active outreach and training. This combination of activities is expected to enable researchers to rapidly perform analyses that are vital for public health and have significant impact in the areas of drug targeting, diagnostic marker and genotyping, infectious disease control, rapid response to pathogen outbreaks and vaccine development.