ZCURVE_V: a new self-training system for recognizing protein-coding genes in viral and phage genomes

Background: It necessary to use highly accurate and statistics-based systems for viral and phage genome annotations. The GeneMark systems for gene-finding in virus and phage genomes suffer from some basic drawbacks. This paper puts forward an alternative approach for viral and phage gene-finding to improve the quality of annotations, particularly for newly sequenced genomes. Results: The new system ZCURVE_V has been run for 979 viral and 212 phage genomes, respectively, and satisfactory results are obtained. To have a fair comparison with the currently available software of similar function, GeneMark, a total of 30 viral genomes that have not been annotated by GeneMark are selected to be tested. Consequently, the average specificity of both systems is well matched, however the average sensitivity of ZCURVE_V for smaller viral genomes (< 100 kb), which constitute the main parts of viral genomes sequenced so far, is higher than that of GeneMark. Additionally, for the genome of Amsact...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Feng-Biao Guo, Chun-Ting Zhang
• Keywords: BMCBI 2006, Genomes, Phage, Viral Genomes