Announcement: xBASE Annotation Service

We're very pleased to announce the availability of the xBASE Annotation Service. This service is designed to produce annotation files from unfinished genome data, e.g. from 454 or Solexa de novo assemblies. The steps involved will be familiar to anyone who has used similar pipelines. Gene prediction is run on the uploaded sequence using Glimmer, functional annotation is called from a reference using BLAST. Non-coding RNAs are detected with tRNAScan-SE and RNAMMER. The final result is a GenBank file suitable for viewing in Artemis.

Two features set this pipeline apart from others. Firstly, it is fast. We aim to ensure annotations are completed in less than 30 minutes and ideally half that. Secondly, we have made it extremely easy to compare your unfinished sequence to a reference by re-ordering and reverse complementing contigs and producing a file suitable for loading directly into ACT. This works whilst preserving any novel regions that may be present. We'd be very pleased to get your feedback on this new function.