Agricultural Microbes Genome 2 Conference Agricultural Microbes Genome 2 Conference
Workshop: Bioinformatics
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A survey of Genbank entries for complete microbial genomes reveals that the majority do not conform to the Genbank standard. Typical deviations from the Genbank standard include putting information in incorrect fields within the Genbank record, adding extraneous and confusing information within a field, and omitting certain useful fields. This situation results from two principal causes: genome centers do not submit Genbank records in the proper form, and the Genbank, EMBL, and DDBJ staff do not enforce the database standards that they have defined. As the number of completed genomes increases, there is less time for human interpretation of Genbank entries. Therefore, reliable retrieval and processing of those entries becomes increasingly dependent on completely automated programs, which are easily confused by incorrectly structured entries. Example Genbank records that conform to the standard are presented. This talk also discusses the uses of the EcoCyc and MetaCyc databases in microbial genome annotation.