AGenDA: gene prediction by comparative sequence analysis.
Comparative sequence analysis is a powerful approach to identify functional elements in genomic sequences. Herein, we describe AGenDA (Alignment-based GENe Detection Algorithm), a novel method for gene prediction that is based on long-range alignment of syntenic regions in eukaryotic genome sequences. Local sequence homologies identified by the DIALIGN program are searched for conserved splice signals to define potential protein-coding exons; these candidate exons are then used to assemble complete gene structures. The performance of our method was tested on a set of 105 human-mouse sequence pairs. These test runs showed that sensitivity and specificity of AGenDA are comparable with the best gene- prediction program that is currently available. However, since our method is based on a completely different type of input information, it can detect genes that are not detectable by standard methods and vice versa. Thus, our approach seems to be a useful addition to existing gene-prediction programs.


BACKGROUND
DIALIGN is available through the Bielefeld Bioinformatics Server (BiBiServ) at http://bibiserv.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/dialign/ The gene-prediction program AGenDA described in this paper will be available through the BiBiServ or MIPS web server at http://mips.gsf.de.
Rinner
Oliver
O
GSF Research Center, MIPS/Institute of Bioinformatics, Ingolstädter Landstrasse 1, 85764 Neuherberg, Germany.
Morgenstern
Burkhard
B
D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D005091:Exons; D006801:Humans; D051379:Mice; D017421:Sequence Analysis