Tag: Reference genome

Announcing Human Annotation Release 110

Announcing Human Annotation Release 110

The annotation of human assemblies GRCh38.p14 and T2T-CHM13v2.0

We are happy to announce the first de novo annotation of human T2T-CHM13v2.0, the gap-less assembly generated by the T2T Consortium, and the full re-annotation of the human reference assembly, GRCh38.p14. We hope the results will serve both the needs of those eager to explore newly sequenced regions of the genome, including telomeres and centromeres, and those interested in refreshing their interpretation of the human reference, in light of recently curated transcripts and new transcriptomic and other data incorporated in the annotation. Continue reading “Announcing Human Annotation Release 110” →

New RefSeq annotations!

New RefSeq annotations!

In December and January, the NCBI Eukaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline released twenty-four new annotations in RefSeq for the following organisms:

    • Aegilops tauschii (monocot)
    • Camelus bactrianus (Bactrian camel)
    • Colias croceus (clouded yellow)
    • Echinops telfairi (small Madagascar hedgehog)
    • Harmonia axyridis (beetle)
    • Lemur catta (Ring-tailed lemur)
    • Leopardus geoffroyi (Geoffroy’s cat)
    • Macaca fascicularis (crab-eating macaque)
    • Maniola jurtina (meadow brown)
    • Meles meles (Eurasian badger)
    • Melitaea cinxia (Glanville fritillary) (pictured) 

Continue reading “New RefSeq annotations!” →

Announcing the re-annotation of RefSeq genome assemblies for E. coli and four other species!

We have re-annotated all RefSeq genomes for Escherichia coli, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Bacillus subtilis, Acinetobacter pittii, and Campylobacter jejuni using the most recent release of PGAP. You will find that more genes now have gene symbols (e.g. recA). Your feedback indicated that the lack of symbols was an impediment to comparative analysis, so we hope that this improvement will help.

The number of re-annotated genomes is 25,619 for E. coli, 470 for B. subtilis, 6,828 for M. tuberculosis, 316 for A. pittii, and 1,829 for C. jejuni. On average, the increase in gene symbols is 30% in E. coli, 110% in B. subtilis, 57% in M. tuberculosis, 94% in A. pittii and 62% in C. jejuni (see Figure 1). After re-annotation, on average, 73% of PGAP-annotated E. coli genes and 79% of B. subtilis have symbols (35% for M. tuberculosis, 40% for A. pittii and 46% for C. jejuni). We assigned symbols to the annotated genes by calculating the orthologs between the genome of interest and the reference assembly for the species, and transferring the symbols from the reference genes to their orthologs in the annotated genomes.

Figure 1: Average and standard deviation of the number of genes annotated with symbols per genome, in the previous (blue) and the current annotation (orange). 

Continue reading “Announcing the re-annotation of RefSeq genome assemblies for E. coli and four other species!” →

Announcing the RefSeq annotation of rat mRatBN7.2!

Announcing the RefSeq annotation of rat mRatBN7.2!

NCBI RefSeq has finished its initial annotation of the new rat reference assembly, mRatBN7.2, recently released by the Darwin Tree of Life Project at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. This is the first coordinate-changing update to the rat reference since the 2014 release of Rnor_6.0 from the Rat Genome Sequencing Consortium and brings the rat assembly into the modern age with a nearly 300x increase in contig N50 and 9x increase in scaffold N50 lengths. It’s a major improvement!

Continue reading “Announcing the RefSeq annotation of rat mRatBN7.2!” →

Updated and improved collection of RefSeq representative genome assemblies now available

We have updated the collection of representative genome assemblies for Bacteria and Archaea. As announced in April, this set is now recalculated three times a year. We selected a total of 11,727 prokaryotic assemblies to represent their respective species among the 192,000 assemblies in RefSeq. Six hundred and thirty-five species were included in the collection for the first time, while 395 organisms from undefined species (such as Bacillus bacterium) were removed. We were able to choose a higher-quality representative than in the previous set for 18% of Bacterial and Archaeal species due to improvements in the logic of the selection that is now based on the assembly length, number of pseudo CDSs called in the PGAP annotation, number of scaffolds, whether Gene IDs are available in the Gene database for the assembly that is currently representative, and type strain status. You can see the exact criteria in order of importance on the Prokaryotic RefSeq Genomes page. Now that the new selection process is in place, we expect future updates to have fewer changes. We will replace a representative only if the assembly has changed RefSeq status or if a substantially better assembly becomes available.

We have updated the database on the Microbial Nucleotide BLAST page as well as the basic nucleotide BLAST RefSeq Representative Genome Database, to reflect these changes.

You can download the reference and representative set from the Assembly resource. If you are interested in the annotation on these genomes, you can limit searches to proteins annotated on representative genomes by adding “refseq_select[filter]” to any query in the Protein database. For example, you can find all proteins annotated on representative genomes in the genus Klebsiella by using the query: “Klebsiella[organism] AND refseq_select[filter]“.  A BLAST database of proteins annotated on representative genomes will be coming soon. Stay tuned!

Major update for the NCBI RefSeq mouse GRCm38.p6 annotation

We have updated our annotation for the mouse reference genome, GRCm38.p6. It includes:

  • Markup for RefSeq Select, which identifies one representative transcript and protein for every protein-coding gene. Find features with the ‘tag=RefSeq Select’ attribute in GFF3 for those analyses where you need just a single transcript or protein for each coding gene. You can also find these RefSeqs in Entrez using the query ‘refseq_select[filter].’
  • Annotation updates made in the last year for over 2000 genes, including over 4000 new or revised curated transcripts. This includes targeted curation to ensure we are representing well-expressed and conserved transcripts for inclusion in RefSeq Select.
  • Annotation of over 2300 regulatory and other functional element features from over 900 biological regions. These are now identified with the source “RefSeqFE” in GFF3 column 2 for easy parsing.

When citing, please refer to this annotation as NCBI Mus musculus Annotation Release 108.20200622. You can find the data in:

This is our last update before upgrading to the new major assembly version just released by the Genome Reference Consortium, GRCm39. We expect to be cranking up our compute farm in the next few weeks to produce a full annotation based on our latest curation and extensive short (Illumina) and long (PacBio IsoSeq and nanopore) RNA-seq data, which should be released later this summer. Stay tuned!

Recalculation of prokaryotic reference and representative genome assemblies

We have updated the collection of representative and reference assemblies for Bacteria and Archaea to better reflect the taxonomic breadth of the prokaryotes in RefSeq.  We chose the 11,478 representative assemblies in the new collection from the 180,000+ prokaryotic assemblies in RefSeq today.  We have selected one representative or reference assembly for every species based on several criteria including contiguity, completeness and whether the assembly is from type material.  We have also updated the reference and representative microbial Blast database to reflect these changes. This reference and representative set will be updated three times a year to reflect changes in RefSeq.  In addition, as we announced on Feb 14, we have reduced the number of reference genome assemblies — the subset of representative assemblies with annotation provided by outside experts —  to 15. See the list in our previous post .  We have re-annotated the 104 assemblies that are no longer reference with or Prokaryotic Genome Annotations Pipel (PGAP).

Important changes coming to prokaryotic Reference and Representative genome assemblies

We are making changes to the set of bacterial and archaeal RefSeq Reference and Representative assemblies in February 2020.

  • We will reduce the number of Reference assemblies to 15 that have annotation provided by outside experts (Table 1) and re-annotate the 105 other current Reference assemblies using the latest Prokaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline (PGAP) software. The re-annotated assemblies will lose reference status.
  • We will reassess and revise the set of Representative assemblies so that there is one assembly per species to better reflect the taxonomic diversity of the RefSeq bacterial and archaeal assemblies.

Continue reading “Important changes coming to prokaryotic Reference and Representative genome assemblies” →

Important changes to the genomes FTP site in February

We have added the latest NCBI Eukaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline results for the more than 580 species that we annotate to the genomes/refseq directory on the genomes FTP area. As we announced in December, we will stop publishing annotation results to the genus_species directories (example: genomes/Xenopus_tropicalis) on the genomes FTP site effective February 1, 2020. We will also move existing genus_species directories to genomes/archive/old_refseq during the month of February.X_t_assemblyFigure 1. The Assembly page for the Xenopus tropicalis UCB Xtro 10.0 (GCF_000004195.4) showing the blue download button. Annotation results such as the RefSeq transcript alignments that can be downloaded from the web page are now also under the genomes/refseq directory on the FTP site. The FTP path to the .bam alignment files is in red.

These FTP changes do not affect the Assembly download function. As always, you can download assembly data using the blue Download button on the web pages (Figure 1).

 

500 organisms annotated with the Eukaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline

This month, the NCBI Eukaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline annotated its 500th organism! The lucky winner is Pocillopora damicornis, a stony reef-building coral frequently used as an experimental model, whose larval dispersal and development are affected by environmental changes in the oceans.

Stony coral (Pocillopora damicornis)

Continue reading “500 organisms annotated with the Eukaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline” →