VIGOR, an annotation program for small viral genomes

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

To assess the performance of VIGOR, five sets of annotated sample sequences were downloaded from Gen-Bank. These included influenza virus, rotavirus, coronavirus, SARS coronavirus and rhinovirus. VIGOR was compared to three separate gene finding programs: GeneMarkS, ZCURVE_V and FLAN. GeneMarkS [2] and ZCURVE_V [14] both are ab initio universal gene finding programs. FLAN is a web-based gene prediction tool specific for influenza viruses that was developed at NCBI for the Influenza Genome Sequencing Project and has been widely used to annotate influenza sequences [15] . FLAN uses the similarity based approach, comparing the influenza genomic sequences with annotated influenza peptide sequences to identify open reading frames. GeneMarkS and ZCURVE_V were run for all sample genomes, while FLAN was run only on influenza genomes.