Achievement

A second team of IGERT students developed an application for genome assembly quality control. Working with our national lab partner, they studied the bioinformatics and high-throughput sequencing pipeline and learned about the problems developing as massive amounts of sequence data becomes available. After reading primary bioinformatics and genomics literature, they developed an idea of using full intergenomic structural comparisons instead of sequence-level or database-specific comparisons to auto curate new sequenced genomes. They created an application to accomplish this task and ran preliminary experiments to determine its effectiveness. While the code still needs developmental work before it could be implemented in the pipeline, they have concluded that their approach could narrow the need for manual gene curation and thereby increase the speed and quality of the overall genome annotation effort.