Annotation and visualization of parasite, fungi and arthropod genomes with Companion.

As sequencing genomes has become increasingly popular, the need for annotation of the resulting assemblies is growing. Structural and functional annotation is still challenging as it includes finding the correct gene sequences, annotating other elements such as RNA and being able to submit those data to databases to share it with the community. Compared to de novo assembly where contiguous chromosomes are a sign of high quality, it is difficult to visualize and assess the quality of annotation. We developed the Companion web server to allow non-experts to annotate their genome using a reference-based method, enabling them to assess the output before submitting to public databases. In this update paper, we describe how we have included novel methods for gene finding and made the Companion server more efficient for annotation of genomes of up to 1 Gb in size. The reference set was increased to include genomes of interest for human and animal health from the fungi and arthropod kingdoms. We show that Companion outperforms existing comparable tools where closely related references are available.

peaks2utr: a robust Python tool for the annotation of 3' UTRs.

SUMMARY: Annotation of nonmodel organisms is an open problem, especially the detection of untranslated regions (UTRs). Correct annotation of UTRs is crucial in transcriptomic analysis to accurately capture the expression of each gene yet is mostly overlooked in annotation pipelines. Here we present peaks2utr, an easy-to-use Python command line tool that uses the UTR enrichment of single-cell technologies, such as 10× Chromium, to accurately annotate 3' UTRs for a given canonical annotation. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: peaks2utr is implemented in Python 3 (≥3.8). It is available via PyPI at https://pypi.org/project/peaks2utr and GitHub at https://github.com/haessar/peaks2utr. It is licensed under GNU GPLv3.