Genome Annotation Transfer Utility (GATU): rapid annotation of viral genomes using a closely related reference genome

Tcherepanov, Vasily; Ehlers, Angelika; Upton, Chris

The utility of GATU is illustrated here by the annotation of sheeppox virus strain A (SPPV-A) which was deposited to GenBank unannotated (AY077833). The related SPPV strain TU-V02127 (NC_004002) is used here as the reference genome. The annotations are extracted from the reference genome and displayed graphically (Figure 2) . The SPPV genomes are approximately 150 kb in length; running on one processor of a dual 1.0 GHz Macintosh G4, the automated process took less than 15 min to complete, with no user intervention required during this time. However, if a BLAST search is also performed against the NCBI nr database for each ORF, the running time will be substantially longer; we routinely run these searches interactively since only a small fraction of the ORFs require them.