Structural and Functional Annotation of Model and Non-Model Organisms with GenSAS v5.0, a Web-Based Annotation Platform

The Genome Sequence Annotation Server v5.0 (GenSAS, www.gensas.org) is a web-based annotation platform that combines several common annotation tools into one easy-to-use, integrated resource. The annotation process is carried out in user-friendly interfaces with embedded instructions and only requires a user account and internet access. GenSAS has annotation tools for eukaryotes and prokaryotes and supports model and non-model organisms. The newest version of GenSAS allows users to upload Illumina RNA-Seq reads, align the reads to the genome, and use the data to train the gene model prediction programs, which allows for more accurate gene models for eukaryotic genomes, especially non-model organisms. JBrowse and Apollo are integrated into GenSAS allowing structural annotation results to be easily viewed and manual annotation curation to be performed. Users can share GenSAS projects with other users and manual curation can easily be a collaborative project. GenSAS also has a functional annotation step to assign protein functions and identify functional domains to the official gene set. After the annotation process is complete, the final step of the GenSAS pipeline is to generate the required files for publication.