The i5k Workspace@NAL - Updates and New Developments of an Arthropod Genome Portal

The i5k Workspace@NAL is a genome portal designed to meet the genome curation, visualization, and dissemination needs of the arthropod genomics community. Any orphaned arthropod genome project in need of manual curation or other genome portal resources is welcome to submit their data to us for hosting. The i5k Workspace provides a central organism page for each project, data downloads, a BLAST search engine, the Jbrowse genome browser, and the Web Apollo manual curation tool. Updates to our services including new content, as well as a new user interface, which enables a more streamlined user experience, facilitated by new tutorials to allow the users to better understand i5k Workspace functions. Several tools are under active development. Clustal Omega and HMMer are being integrated into our web services to provide users more ways to search the sequence data. Finally, we are developing a new pipeline that constructs Official Gene Sets to establish representative gene annotations for future studies. The pipeline incorporates two steps: (1) quality control of formatting errors caused by manual curation; and (2) integration of computationally predicted gene models with manually curated gene models. The updates of i5k Workspace@NAL facilitate the genome annotation process of arthropod genomes, and are expected to benefit the arthropod genomics community in future.