Advances in DNA sequencing technology have significantly reduced the costs associated with sequencing an organism's genome. This has led to greater numbers of plant genomes being sequenced. Once sequenced and re-assembled, these genome sequences are annotated to identify genes and other important sequence features. Annotation usually involves computational analysis by a bioinformaticist followed by manual (biologist) curation of the predicted genes. While there are many standalone (command line) pipelines available and many individual web based tools available for annotation, there are no one-stop web sites where the biologist can access several gene prediction tools and have the integrated and optimized results returned to them for manual curation. Several fruit genomes are currently being sequenced (apple, peach, strawberry, citrus and cacao) and the annotations will be made available via the tree fruit genome databases housed at Washington State University. This project focuses on implementing a framework of web-based gene prediction and comparative sequence similarity applications that performs automated sequence annotation including gene structure and function predictions, and enable user based manipulation of the results via the application GenSAS, the Genome Sequence Annotation Server
