Harris N L
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Human Genome Informatics Group, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
Genome Res. 1997 Jul;7(7):754-62. doi: 10.1101/gr.7.7.754.
Sequencing centers such as the Human Genome Center at LBNL are producing an ever-increasing flood of genetic data. Annotation can greatly enhance the biological value of these sequences. Useful annotations include possible gene locations, homologies to known genes, and gene signal such as promoters and splice sites. Genotator is a workbench for automated sequence annotation and annotation browsing. The back end runs a series of sequence analysis tools on a DNA sequence, handling the various input and output formats required by the tools. Genotator currently runs five different gene-finding programs, three homology searches, and searches for promoters, splice sites, and ORFs. The results of the analyses run by Genotator can be viewed with the interactive graphical browser. The browser displays color-coded sequence annotations on a canvas that can be scrolled and zoomed, allowing the annotated sequence to be explored at multiple levels of detail. The user can view the actual DNA sequence in a separate window; when a region is selected in the map display, it is highlighted automatically in the sequence display, and vice versa. By displaying the output of all of the sequence analyses, Genotator provides an intuitive way to identify the significant regions (for example, probable exons) in a sequence. Users can interactively add personal annotations to label regions of interest. Additional capabilities of Genotator include primer design and pattern searching.
诸如劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室的人类基因组中心等测序中心正在产生数量不断增加的海量遗传数据。注释能够极大地提升这些序列的生物学价值。有用的注释包括可能的基因位置、与已知基因的同源性以及基因信号，如启动子和剪接位点。Genotator是一个用于自动序列注释和注释浏览的工作台。后端在DNA序列上运行一系列序列分析工具，处理这些工具所需的各种输入和输出格式。Genotator目前运行五个不同的基因查找程序、三次同源性搜索以及对启动子、剪接位点和开放阅读框的搜索。Genotator所运行分析的结果可以通过交互式图形浏览器查看。该浏览器在一个可以滚动和缩放的画布上显示颜色编码的序列注释，从而能够在多个细节层面探索注释后的序列。用户可以在一个单独的窗口中查看实际的DNA序列；当在图谱显示中选择一个区域时，它会在序列显示中自动突出显示，反之亦然。通过显示所有序列分析的输出结果，Genotator提供了一种直观的方式来识别序列中的重要区域（例如，可能的外显子）。用户可以交互式地添加个人注释来标记感兴趣的区域。Genotator的其他功能包括引物设计和模式搜索。
