Authors

Z Lu²; A Tracey²; J Assis¹; N Holroyd²; G Sankaranarayanan²; G Rinaldi²; M Berriman²;  ¹ FEDERAL UNIVERSITY OF MINAS GERAIS, Brazil;  ² Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, UK

Discussion

We introduce here a high-quality annotation towards the upgrade of genome sequence V5.2 to V7.0 for Schistosoma mansoni. As a result of moving from a very fragmented assembly to a very contiguous assembly and comparing the results of direct annotation-transfer (using RATT) and gene finding (using Augustus based on RNAseq evidence), > 740 previously incomplete or absent gene models are now correctly resolved and about 850 spurious gene models have been deleted. The structures of about 1000 gene models have changed (> 20% difference) and about 800 novel genes have been discovered. All the above-mentioned gene models have been manually examined and curated using WebApollo. Furthermore, the use of Pacbio Iso-Seq reads supported the predictions of alternative splicing, and it has been possible to accurately annotate UTRs, which were previously lacking in V5.2. Besides, more than 70 genes have at least 2 copies in the new genome and several protein families are found to be extended.