VIGOR extended to annotate genomes for additional 12 different viruses

Wang, Shiliang; Sundaram, Jaideep P.; Stockwell, Timothy B.

Norovirus is responsible for at least 23 million cases of foodborne illness every year in the USA (15) . The spread of norovirus can result in gastroenteritis epidemics. Noroviruses constitute a genus in the calicivirus family. The viruses enclose a non-segmented, positive singlestranded RNA genome of 7.7 kb with three genes encoded (16) . The second and third genes encode viral structure proteins named VP1 and VP2. The first large ORF encodes a non-structural protein that will be digested into six mature peptides by the viral 3C-like protease (3CL pro ). The mature peptides p48, NTPase, p22, VPg, 3CL pro and RdRp are ordered from N-to C-terminus (16) . VIGOR predicted 294 genes in 98 norovirus genomes. All of these 294 predictions agreed with GenBank annotations (Table 1) . Only a small number of norovirus genomes have their mature peptides annotated in GenBank. The mature peptides predicted by VIGOR completely agreed with GenBank annotations when available. For those without mature peptide annotations in GenBank, the conserved cleavage sites (p48-(QG)-NTPase-(QG)-p22-(EG)-VPg-(EA)-3CL pro -(EA)-RdRp) were inspected, and the alignments between VIGOR prediction and homologous peptides were also examined. All the mature peptides predicted by VIGOR were correct (data not shown).