ORCAE: Online Resource for Community Annotation of Eukaryotes

Conducting gene and genome annotation typically relies on diverse information resources going from sequence to expression data depending on whether structural or functional annotation is performed. To help researchers doing gene annotation while having access to these different data types, we developed ORCAE (Online Resource for Community Annotation of Eukaryotes), a web-technology-compliant portal for use in community genome annotation efforts.

ORCAE allows browsing and on the fly editing of gene structures and descriptions, moreover all manual curations are immediately visible for other users and for each locus a history of modifications is available.

Through its interface, ORCAE offers easy access to precomputed information that greatly facilitates the work of a curator. The gene page offers several informative graphics with a focus on gene structure quality (eg. multiple alignments of homologs) helping human annotators in improving the proposed automated annotation. Annotators can then use the build-in GenomeView interface to easily check/modify gene structures. A unique feature of ORCAE is that the portal is highly dynamic: on modification of a gene model, all the available information is immediately updated and presented on the gene page.

ORCAE can both be used to coordinate ongoing annotation efforts as well as to present published genomes to the public by acting as a genome portal. Therefore it is equipped with all the necessary features: advanced text-search, Blast functionality and a genome browsing interface (AnnoJ).

ORCAE is available at http://bioinformatics.psb.ugent.be/orcae/ and can now also be downloaded for local installation.