VIGOR, an annotation program for small viral genomes

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

We have demonstrated that VIGOR, a RNA virus gene prediction tool, can predict protein coding genes with high accuracy for 5 different RNA virus types, influenza virus, rotavirus, rhinovirus, coronavirus and SARS coronavirus. VIGOR is available for public use at http:// www.jcvi.org/vigor. VIGOR has been thoroughly field tested in several high throughput genome sequencing projects at the JCVI. VIGOR has been employed to predict the protein coding genes successfully for 51 newly sequenced group A rotavirus complete genomes sequenced at JCVI [30] and to annotate and predict mature peptides for 66 rhinovirus full genome sequences [21] . The similarity based program has been also used to annotate the published sequences of bovine, feline, human, murine, rat, SARS and several novel wild animal coronavirus genomes [22] [23] [24] [25] . Partial genomes and the potential sequence errors which generate premature stop codons or frameshifts were identified by VIGOR as well during the genome finishing process for these viral sequencing projects.