VIGOR, an annotation program for small viral genomes

Wang, Shiliang; Sundaram, Jaideep P; Spiro, David

Rotavirus genomes are made up of 11 segments of double stranded RNA encoding 6 viral structural proteins (VP1-4, VP6-7) and 6 non-structural proteins (NSP1-6). Non-structural protein 5 and 6 are encoded by same genomic segment; the coding regions overlap, but are in different reading frames [18] . 19 G types and 27 P types of rotaviruses based on structural proteins VP7 and VP4 were recorded We downloaded from GenBank 1166 rotavirus sequence segments with 1158 annotated genes, and ran in parallel VIGOR, ZCURVE_V and GeneMarkS analyses. VIGOR predicted 1202 protein coding genes including 44 newly detected ORFs which were not annotated in GenBank. Three predictions picked different start codons compared to the annotations in Gen-Bank. These new predictions were examined closely and all of them are homologous to NSP6 with very good similarities (E-value < 1e-10, data not shown).