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Coding Exon-Structure Aware Realigner (CESAR): Utilizing Genome Alignments for Comparative Gene Annotation

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Gene Prediction

Part of the book series: Methods in Molecular Biology ((MIMB,volume 1962))

Abstract

Alignment-based gene identification methods utilize sequence conservation between orthologous protein-coding genes to annotate genes in newly sequenced genomes. CESAR is an approach that makes use of existing genome alignments to transfer genes from one genome to other aligned genomes, and thus generates comparative gene annotations. To accurately detect conserved exons that exhibit an intact reading frame and consensus splice sites, CESAR produces a new alignment between orthologous exons, taking information about the exon’s reading frame and splice site positions into account. Furthermore, CESAR is able to detect most evolutionary splice site shifts, which helps to annotate exon boundaries at high precision. Here, we describe how to apply CESAR to generate comparative gene annotations for one or many species, and discuss the strengths and limitations of this approach. CESAR is available at https://github.com/hillerlab/CESAR2.0.

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Acknowledgment

This work was supported by the Max Planck Society and the German Research Foundation (HI 1423/3-1).

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Correspondence to Michael Hiller .

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Sharma, V., Hiller, M. (2019). Coding Exon-Structure Aware Realigner (CESAR): Utilizing Genome Alignments for Comparative Gene Annotation. In: Kollmar, M. (eds) Gene Prediction. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1962. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-9173-0_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-9173-0_10

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  • Publisher Name: Humana, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4939-9172-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4939-9173-0

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