Balrog: A universal protein model for prokaryotic gene prediction.

Low-cost, high-throughput sequencing has led to an enormous increase in the number of sequenced microbial genomes, with well over 100,000 genomes in public archives today. Automatic genome annotation tools are integral to understanding these organisms, yet older gene finding methods must be retraine...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Markus J Sommer, Steven L Salzberg
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2021-02-01
Series:PLoS Computational Biology
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008727
Description
Summary:Low-cost, high-throughput sequencing has led to an enormous increase in the number of sequenced microbial genomes, with well over 100,000 genomes in public archives today. Automatic genome annotation tools are integral to understanding these organisms, yet older gene finding methods must be retrained on each new genome. We have developed a universal model of prokaryotic genes by fitting a temporal convolutional network to amino-acid sequences from a large, diverse set of microbial genomes. We incorporated the new model into a gene finding system, Balrog (Bacterial Annotation by Learned Representation Of Genes), which does not require genome-specific training and which matches or outperforms other state-of-the-art gene finding tools. Balrog is freely available under the MIT license at https://github.com/salzberg-lab/Balrog.
ISSN:1553-734X
1553-7358