Automatic annotation of eukaryotic genes, pseudogenes and promoters

Background The ENCODE gene prediction workshop (EGASP) has been organized to evaluate how well state-of-the-art automatic gene finding methods are able to reproduce the manual and experimental gene annotation of the human genome. We have used Softberry gene finding software to predict genes, pseudogenes and promoters in 44 selected ENCODE sequences representing approximately 1% (30 Mb) of the human genome. Predictions of gene finding programs were evaluated in terms of their ability to reproduce the ENCODE-HAVANA annotation. Results The Fgenesh++ gene prediction pipeline can identify 91% of coding nucleotides with a specificity of 90%. Our automatic pseudogene finder (PSF program) found 90% of the manually annotated pseudogenes and some new ones. The Fprom promoter prediction program identifies 80% of TATA promoters sequences with one false positive prediction per 2,000 base-pairs (bp) and 50% of TATA-less promoters with one false positive prediction per 650 bp. It can be used to identify transcription start sites upstream of annotated coding parts of genes found by gene prediction software. Conclusion We review our software and underlying methods for identifying these three important structural and functional genome components and discuss the accuracy of predictions, recent advances and open problems in annotating genomic sequences. We have demonstrated that our methods can be effectively used for initial automatic annotation of the eukaryotic genome.

comprehensive and accurate are such computational analyses, the less time-consuming and costly experimental work will have to be done to determine all functional elements in new genomes. Using computational predictions, the scientific community can get at least partial knowledge of a majority of real genes, because gene finding programs usually correctly predict most exons of each gene.
The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) has initiated the ENCODE project to discover all human genome functional elements [2]. Its pilot phase is focused on performance evaluation of different techniques of genome annotation, including computational analysis, on a specified 30 Mb of human genome sequence. The 2005 ENCODE gene prediction workshop (E-GASP '05) [3] was organized to evaluate how well automatic annotation methods are able to reproduce manual annotations. This paper describes computational methods for identifying three important structural and functional genome components: genes, pseudogenes and promoters. We used Softberry gene finding software to predict genes, pseudogenes and promoters in 44 ENCODE sequences. We review the performance of our software and underlying methods for identifying these three important structural and functional genome components, and discuss the accuracy of predictions, recent advances and open problems in annotating genomic sequences.

Running Fgenesh++ on ENCODE sequences
Two sets of ENCODE sequences were prepared to run on the gene prediction pipeline: 44 original ENCODE sequences, and 44 ENCODE sequences with repeats masked by N. Files with coordinates of repeats were downloaded from UCSC web pages devoted to ENCODE project [4]. Low complexity regions and simple repeats were not masked. All three steps of the pipeline were run to annotate ENCODE sequences.
Step 1: mapping known mRNAs and selecting good mappings A set of known human mRNA sequences was prepared from RefSeq. Only RefSeq records with an accession prefix NM_ and a status key REVIEWED, that is, those corresponding to curated and reviewed RefSeq mRNA records, were taken into account. Known mRNAs were mapped by Est_map to 44 ENCODE sequences, and good mappings were automatically selected by the pipeline. Areas corresponding to mapped mRNAs were masked to exclude them from subsequent gene prediction steps.
Step 2: mapping known proteins by Prot_map followed by protein homology-based gene prediction by Fgenesh+ In this step, genes are predicted based on homology to known proteins -as a rule, it improves quality of predicted gene models. The NR (non-redundant) database of protein sequences was used as a source of known proteins. First, gene models were predicted using a combination of Prot_map and Fgenesh+: Prot_map maps the NR database to genomic sequences, and Fgenesh+ predicts more refined gene models in regions corresponding to mapped proteins. Then, predicted gene models were additionally filtered by a script that analyses blast2 alignment between predicted proteins and protein homologs. Only reliable models that have a blast score >100 and coverage >80% for both proteins and homologs were selected.
Step 3: ab initio gene prediction In this step, special scripts prepared sequence fragments that contained no gene models from steps 1 and 2. Then gene models in these sequence fragments were predicted ab initio by Fgenesh. Finally, gene predictions were converted from the Fgenesh-like output format into GTF format, which is required for submission of results to E-GASP '05.

Results of Fgenesh++ application to ENCODE sequences
While doing calculations for EGASP, we annotated ENCODE regions of the hg16 version (NCBI build 34). HAVANA annotation, against which results were compared by EGASP, was done on the hg17 version. Four ENCODE sequences were changed upon transition from hg16 to hg17: ENm006, ENm014, ENr131, ENr211. We re-annotated these four sequences (after the EGASP deadline), and the results presented here include this correction.
When calculating the prediction accuracy, only coding sequence (CDS) blocks, from Softberry predictions as well as from the HAVANA annotation, were taken into account. We used the HAVANA annotation file '44regions_coding.gff', the version of 7 June 2005, which describes 1,078 transcripts with CDS containing 673,501 nucleotides (the HAVANA annotation was taken into account only within the range of ENCODE sequences). The accuracy results are presented in Table 1. At the nucleotide level we estimated sensitivity (Sn) as the percentage of true coding bases that were correctly predicted as coding, and specificity (Sp) as the percentage of bases predicted to be in coding regions that were actually coding. We observed Sn = 0.9 and Sp = 0.8 at the nucleotide level. To measure accuracy at the CDS level, a non-redundant set of CDS was considered. Sensitivity (Sn) at the CDS level is the number of CDS predicted correctly divided by the number of known CDS, and specificity (Sp) is the number of predicted CDS that are correct divided by the number of all predicted CDS. When calculating the accuracies, CDS orientation is checked for known and predicted CDS. We observed Sn = 0.78 and Sp = 0.74 at the CDS level. More than 50% of predicted coding bases were predicted with the help of homologous proteins from the NR database, and approximately 35% were predicted with the help of mRNAs from RefSeq.
Performance at the level of exact prediction of all CDS in a gene is presented in Table 2. We can see that all CDSs were predicted exactly for 61% and 52% of genes computed with mRNA and protein support, respectively. It is interesting to note that the Sp for ab initio predictions, which comprise approximately 13% of all predicted nucleotides, is very low. If we exclude ab initio predictions and calculate an accuracy only for mRNA and protein supported predictions, the specificity rises up to 89.5% at the nucleotide level with just a slight decrease in sensitivity (Table 3). On the other hand, if we run just ab initio predictions for 44 ENCODE sequences, we have Sn = 0.88 and Sp = 0.74 at the nucleotide and CDS levels, respectively (Table 3). That is significantly higher than the values for ab initio predictions in Table 1. It might indicate that regions having neither known mRNAs nor homology to known proteins can contain genes that are missed in the HAVANA annotation. Another interesting observation is that ab initio gene finding demonstrates a good performance at the nucleotide level (Sn = 0.88, Sp = 0.74), while it is relatively weak at the level of exact CDS prediction, compared to mRNA-or proteinsupported predictions. Ab initio predictions seem to usually contain one or several errors in a set of gene CDSs, as well as tend to split one gene into two or merge neighbor genes more often.
We did not use expressed sequence tag (EST) information [5] in the generation of our predictions that resulted in the smaller number of predicted alternative transcripts compared with the HAVANA annotation. EST data also can be used for extension of terminal coding exons to their 5' or 3' non-coding parts. Including EST data as well as intergenome similarity data can further improve the annotation quality of our gene prediction pipeline.

Prediction of pseudogenes
We used Softberry gene PSF (pseudogene finding) to identify pseudogenes in 44 ENCODE sequences. This program, described in Materials and methods, recognizes pseudogene sequences using some characteristics of genome alignment regions with their parent proteins. Examples of two types of http://genomebiology.com/2006/7/S1/S10 CDS is considered to be predicted correctly if: both CDS coordinates are predicted correctly (CDS EXACT); at least one CDS edge is predicted correctly (CDS 1EDGE);or predicted CDS overlaps with known CDS (CDS OVERLAP).  pseudogenes, processed and non-processed, and their characteristics are presented in Figures 1 and 2.
We presented to EGASP two sets of pseudogenes found in ENCODE sequences (hg16 release). Four ENCODE sequences were changed upon transition from hg16 to hg17 (ENm006, ENm014, ENr131, ENr211) and the results presented here exclude them. One set, which we called 'reliable set', contained 56 processed pseudogenes, 93% of which almost completely overlap with 52 of 145 HAVANA pseudogenes. Overall, 80 (59%) of 135 pseudogenes from two sets overlapped 82 (57%) of 145 HAVANA pseudogenes.
We improved our PSF automatic pseudogene predictor and reran it. As a result, we found 181 potential pseudogenes, 118 of which had a significant overlap with the annotated 145 HAVANA pseudogenes. Of these 118 pseudogenes, 68 (58%) had only one exon and could be classified as processed pseudogenes: 58 had the parent gene with more than one exon and 7 others had polyA tail. Of the 118 pseudogenes, 106 (90%) had one or more defects in their open reading frames (ORFs). Among the remaining 12, there are 4 pseudogenes with a single exon (while their parents have 4 or more exons), 4 contain both polyA signal and polyA tract, 4 have only a polyA tract, and 2 have only high Ka/Ks ratios (0.59 and 1.04).
PSF did not find 27 HAVANA annotated pseudogenes. Three of them were not reported because they are located in introns of larger pseudogenes (AC006326.4-001, AC006326.2-001 and AL162151.3-001). The other 10 represent fragments of some human proteins and are missing stop codons or frameshifts. We did not include pseudogenes corresponding to fragments of proteins in our pseudogene set. The remaining 14 HAVANA pseudogenes were not found, probably because of some limitation of our program and the processed datasets. Some of them might have parent genes that were absent from our initial protein set compiled by the Fgenesh++ gene prediction pipeline. Some of the 63 pseudogenes that have been predicted by PSF but were absent from the HAVANA set might have appeared because of imperfect predictions by the pipeline, which produced frameshifts when a pseudogene candidate and its parent gene were aligned. However, some of these 'over-predicted' pseudogenes might be actual pseudogenes missed by the HAVANA annotators (see Figure 3 for such an example).
To summarize, the PSF pseudogene prediction program found 81% of annotated pseudogenes. Its quality can further be improved by improving the quality of parent gene-protein sets.

Pol-II promoter recognition
Since each eukaryotic polymerase II promoter has a unique selection and arrangement of regulatory elements, which provide unique instructions for gene expression, the computational identification of promoters in genomic DNA is an extremely difficult problem [6]. This task is two-fold: finding the exact position of a transcription start site within a long upstream region of a typical eukaryotic gene; and avoiding false positive predictions within exon and intron sequences. To resolve the second problem, some authors of promoter finding software include special procedures for recognition of coding parts of gene blocks inside promoter prediction programs [7,8]. However, gene prediction software such as Genscan [9] or Fgenesh [6,10] provides much better accuracy in the identification of coding exons and introns than any such procedures. We think that the best promoter identification strategy is to combine prediction of all gene components in one program. While trying to create such a program, we decided to use some We extracted 5' regions (upstream from the first CDS) from predicted genes and ran Fprom on these sequences. For each region, we selected one predicted promoter closest to the CDS and presented it in our results. There are no data on the exact location of transcription start sites for most of genes. But 5' ends of 'full length' mRNAs from Refseq could, on average, be considered pretty close to actual transcription start sites, whereas their 3' ends are often incomplete. With this in mind, we estimated the accuracy of promoter prediction on 251 genes derived from known Refseq mRNAs with >40 bp in their 5' non-coding sequence. Promoters were predicted for 90% (226) of them. Among them, there were 95 TATA+ and 131 TATA-promoters. Figure 4 shows how close predicted promoters are to starts of corresponding mRNAs.
In Figure 5, we see a sharp peak showing that a substantial fraction of predicted promoters is as close as several bases to mRNA starts. The ability to find many promoters with such precision is a remarkable characteristic of our program that distinguishes it from many promoter finding programs that usually assign promoter within a 200 to 1,000 bp range around actual Transcription Start Site (TSS). We should take into account the occurrence of multiple transcription start sites, especially in genes with TATA-less promoters; therefore, some scattering of the predictions around the annotated TSS should not be unusual. Some predictions that deviate significantly from known 5' ends of mRNAs could belong to alternative promoters, which are not unusual for human genes. The histogram ( Figure 5) might serve as an approximate criterion of program quality and can be used to compare results produced by different approaches. The ideal test should be done with experimentally verified transcription start sites, but accounting for multiple TSSs will present complications even in such a setting.

Conclusions
In this paper we present an implementation of three computational pipelines (Fgenesh++, PSF and Fprom) for automatic identification of protein coding genes, pseudogenes and promoters in eukaryotic genomes. These pipelines, applied to analysis of 44 selected ENCODE sequences, demonstrated an ability to reproduce, to a significant extent, the manual ENCODE-HAVANA annotation. Fgenesh++ gene prediction pipeline can identify 91% of coding nucleotides with a specificity of 90%. The automatic pseudogene finder (PSF program) found 90% of manually annotated pseudogenes and some new ones. Fprom promoter prediction program identifies 80% of TATA promoter sequences with one false positive prediction per 2,000 base pairs (bp), and 50% of TATA-less promoters with one false positive per 650 bp. It can be used to identify transcription start sites upstream of annotated coding parts of genes found by gene prediction software. Thus, the pipelines could be used for easy and fast production of reasonably accurate first pass annotation of a new genome. The described software and its components can be run on computers with Unix operation systems, as well as with Windows as part of the Molquest program package.

Fgenesh++ gene identification pipeline
About 41% of sequenced human DNA consists of different kinds of repeats. Only approximately 3% of the genome sequence contains protein coding exon sequences. Gene sizes can be as large as hundreds of megabases in vertebrates, especially in primates. The average size of an exon is S10.6 Genome Biology 2006, Volume 7, Supplement 1, Article S10 Solovyev et al. http://genomebiology.com/2006/7/S1/S10 Genome Biology 2006, 7(Suppl 1):S10

Figure 3
Pseudogene in ENm004 sequence, absent from HAVANA annotation. The alignment has a stop codon close to position 151636.  about 190 bp, which is close to the DNA length associated with a nucleosome particle. Human exons are significantly smaller than genes. There are many exons as short as several bases. Moreover, the same DNA sequences may code several different proteins due to alternative promoters or terminators and alternative splicing. These processes make computational gene finding a rather nontrivial task.

Hidden Markov model based eukaryotic gene identification
Exons, introns, 5' and 3' UTRs regions are different components (states) of gene structure that occupy k nonoverlapping subsequences of a sequence. There are 35 states in a eukaryotic gene model, considering direct and reverse chains as possible gene location. A gene structure can be considered as an ordered set of state/sub-sequence pairs, φ = {(q 1 ,x 1 ),(q 2 ,x 2 ), … ,(q k ,x k )}, called a parse. A parse φ is considered a predicted gene structure if probability P(X, φ) of generating X according to φ is maximal over all possible parses, or when a score is optimal in some meaningful sense. This probability can be computed using statistical parameters describing a particular state and generated from a training set of known gene structures and sequences. Successive states of this hidden Markov model (HMM) are generated according to the Markov process with inclusion of explicit state duration density. A simple technique based on a dynamic programming method for finding an optimal parse, or the best sequence of states, is the Viterbi algorithm, which requires o(N 2 D 2 L) calculations, where N is the number of states, D is the longest duration and L is the sequence length [11]. A helpful technique to reduce the number of states and simplify computations by modeling non-coding state length with a geometrical distribution to predict multiple genes was initially implemented in the Genscan algorithm [9]. Several other successful HMM-based gene finding programs, such as HMMgene [12], a variant of Genie [13] and GeneMark [14], and Fgenesh [6,10] have been developed. Fgenesh (Find GENES using Hmm) is currently one of the most accurate and the fastest program. The run time of Fgenesh is practically linear, and the current version has no practical limit on length of analyzed sequence. Predicting genes in 34.5 Mb of human chromosome 22 sequence takes about 1.5 minutes with a EV6 Decalpha processor and is even faster on modern Linux computers.
An ab initio gene prediction program such as Fgenesh predicts about 93% of all coding exon bases and exactly predicts about 80% of human exons when applied to single gene sequences ( Table 4). Analysis of multi-gene, long genomic sequences is a more complicated task. A program can erroneously join neighboring genes or split a gene into two or more. To improve automatic annotation accuracy, we http://genomebiology.com/2006/7/S1/S10 Genome Biology 2006, Volume 7, Supplement 1, Article S10 Solovyev et al. S10.7 Genome Predicted TSS coord. relative to gene starts (+1) Number of predicted promoters developed a pipeline Fgenesh++, which can take into account available supporting data such as mRNA or homologous protein sequences.

Components of the Fgenesh++ gene prediction pipeline
Fgenesh++ is a pipeline for automatic prediction of genes in eukaryotic genomes without human modification of results. It uses the following sequence analysis software.

Fgenesh
Fgenesh is a HMM-based ab initio gene prediction program.

Fgenesh+
Fgenesh+ is a gene prediction program that uses homologous protein sequence to improve performance.

Est_map
Est_map is a program for mapping known mRNAs/ESTs to a genome, producing genome alignment with splice site identification.

Prot_map
Prot_map is a program for mapping a protein database to genomic sequence.

Est_map
Est_map can map a set of mRNAs/ESTs to a chromosome sequence. For example, 11,000 full-length mRNA sequences from a NCBI reference set were mapped to a 52 Mb unmasked Y chromosome fragment in approximately 20 minutes. Est_map takes into account statistical features of splice sites for more accurate mapping.

Prot_map
The Prot_map program maps a set of protein sequences to a genomic sequence, producing gene structures and corresponding alignments of coding exons with similar or identical protein queries. Prot_map uses a genomic sequence and a set of protein sequences as its input data, and reconstructs gene structure based on protein identity or homology, in contrast to a set of unordered alignment fragments generated by Blast [15]. The program is very fast (Table 4), produces gene structures with similar accuracy to those of the relatively slow GeneWise program [16] and does not require knowledge of protein genomic location. The accuracy of gene reconstruction can further be significantly improved using the Fgenesh+ program on the output of Prot_map, that is, a fragment of genomic sequence and the protein sequence mapped to it.
Comparison of accuracy of gene prediction by ab initio Fgenesh and gene prediction with protein support by Fgenesh+ or GeneWise and Prot_map was performed on a large set of human genes with homologous proteins from mouse or Drosophila. We can see that Fgenesh+ shows the best performance with mouse proteins (Table 5). With Drosophila proteins, ab initio prediction by Fgenesh works better than GeneWise for all ranges of similarity, and Fgenesh+ is the best predictor if similarity is higher than 60% (Table 6).   Besides the programs listed above, the Fgenesh++ package also includes files with gene finding parameters for specific genomes, configuration files for programs and a number of Perl scripts. In addition, the Fgenesh++ package uses the following public software and data: BLAST executables blastall and bl2seq [15], the NCBI NR database (nonredundant protein database) formatted for BLAST, and the NCBI RefSeq database [17].
Fgenesh++ requires genome sequences and, optionally, the same sequences with repeats masked by N. Sequences can be either complete chromosomes or their fragments, such as scaffolds, contigs, and so on. When preparing repeat-masked sequences, we recommend not masking low complexity regions and simple repeats, as they can be parts of coding sequences.

Three main steps of the Fgenesh++ pipeline
There are three main steps in running the pipeline: step 1 involves mapping known mRNAs/cDNAs (for example, from RefSeq) to genomic sequences; step 2 involves the prediction of genes based on homology to known proteins (for example, from NR); and step 3 involves ab initio gene prediction in regions having neither mapped mRNAs nor genes predicted based on protein homology.
A user can skip some steps while running the pipeline. For example, to take a first very cursory look at gene models, a user can skip the first two steps and go right to ab initio gene predictions. Generally, step 1 (mapping known mRNAs) can be skipped in the following cases: if there is no representative collection of known mRNAs for a query genome, that is, RefSeq does not contain enough entries and the user does not have their own collection; and if genomic sequences are fragmented, so that individual mRNAs are likely to be broken among several genomic fragments. The output of the pipeline consists of predicted gene structures and corresponding proteins. It also indicates whether particular gene structure was assigned based on mRNA mapping, protein homology, or ab initio gene prediction.

The pseudogene annotation program (PSF)
Our method of searching for pseudogenes can work with two types of initial information available. One type contains exon-intron structures of annotated genes and their protein sequences for a genome under analysis. To get such information, we can execute a gene finding pipeline, such as Fgenesh++. In this case, we run Prot_map program with a set of protein sequences to find possible significant genomeprotein alignments that do not correspond to a location of a gene for mapped protein. Another type of initial data can be a set of known proteins for a given organism. Having such data, we can restore gene structure of a given protein using the Prot_map program. For each mapped protein, we can select the best scoring mapping and the computed exonintron structure as the 'parent' gene structure of this protein.
If the alignment of a protein with its own parent has obvious internal stop codons or frameshifts, this locus could be included in the list of potential pseudogenes, but we need to keep in mind more trivial explanations, such as sequencing errors. Such loci cannot be analyzed on the basis of their Ka/Ks or checked for intron losses. In any case, for each of two cases we have a set of protein sequences, their parent gene structures, and protein-genome alignments for further analysis to identify pseudogenes.

Selecting potential pseudogenes
Using genome-protein alignments generated by the Prot_map program, the PSF program produces a list of alignments possessing the following properties for each protein. First, the identity in blocks of alignment exceeds a certain value. Second, a substantial portion of protein http://genomebiology.com/2006/7/S1/S10 Genome Biology 2006, Volume 7, Supplement 1, Article S10 Solovyev et al. S10.9 Genome  sequence is included in the alignment. Third, the genomic location of alignment differs from that of parent gene. And fourth, at least one of four events is observed: damage to an ORF -there is one or more frameshifts or internal stop codons; a single exon with a close poly-A site -the poly-A site is too close to a 3' end of an alignment, while the carboxyl terminus of the protein sequence is aligned to the last amino acid, and a single exon covers 95% of protein sequence; loss of introns -protein coverage by alignment is at least 95%, and the number of exons is fewer than in the parent gene by a certain number; or the protein sequence is not preserved -the ratio of non-synonymous to synonymous replacements exceeds a certain threshold (Ka/Ks > 0.5). Ka/Ks is calculated relative to the parent gene by the method presented by Nei and Gojobori [18].

Selecting a reliable part of alignment
The procedures described apply to a so-called reliable part of alignment. The necessity of introducing this concept appears due to imperfections in aligning a protein against a chromosome sequence. There are complex cases where accurate alignment cannot be produced, such as very short (1 to 3 bp) exons separated by a large intron, or because of some errors in the protein or genome draft sequence that prevent perfect alignment. For instance, if a protein as a whole is well aligned to a chromosome, but about 20 amino acids on its 5' end cannot be aligned in one continuous block, Prot_map will most likely try to align these 20 amino acids by scattering them along several short blocks. Most likely, these blocks will not have any relation to a gene or a pseudogene. Therefore, when searching for pseudogenes, we remove short insignificant trailer blocks. The rest of the alignment is considered its reliable part. To find the reliable part of an alignment, we evaluate the quality of the alignment blocks (exons). For each exon found by Prot_map, we calculate the number of aligned amino acids (M), the number of non-aligned amino acids (AI) and nucleotides (NI) within an exon, and the number of aligned amino acids (AO) and nucleotides (NO) located outside of the exon region to the left and to the right side of an exon. Also, we compute the 'correctness' of splice site conserved dinucleotides (SSC) that flank an exon. If an exon is an amino or carboxy-terminal one, we also compute the 'correctness' of corresponding start or stop codons. The length of an intron (IL) that separates an exon from its nearest exon in the direction of the longest mapped exon is also computed. The empirical 'quality' measure is defined by the following formula: where P AI , P NI , P AO and P NO are the penalties for the internal and external unaligned amino acids and nucleotides, B SSC is a bonus for the correctness of splice sites or start/stop codons, and P IL is the penalty for high intron length. The reliable part of the alignment consists of a set of neighboring alignment exons that each have Q > 5.
After Prot_map mapping, many loci on a chromosome include alignments with more than one protein. In such cases, we choose only one most reliable alignment, based on a sum of included exon's qualities.

FPROM Pol-II promoter recognition program
The gene annotation pipeline was described above. Here we present our promoter recognition program Fprom (find promoter), which is based on further development of an algorithm realized earlier in the TSSW/TSSG programs [6,19]. It was assumed that TATA+ and TATA-promoters have very different sequence features, so these groups were analyzed separately. Potential TATA+ promoter sequences were selected according to the score value of a Bucher TATA box weight matrix [20], with the threshold close to the minimal score value for the TATA+ promoters in the learning set. Selected significant characteristics of the TATA+ promoter group found by discriminant analysis are presented in Table 7.
For each position on a given sequence, the Fprom program evaluates the occurrence of TSS using two linear discriminant functions (separate for TATA+ and TATA-promoters) with characteristics computed in the [-200, +50] region around a given position. If it finds a TATA-box (using a TATA-box weight matrix) in the region, then it computes the value of Linear Discriminant Function (LDF) for TATA+ S10.10 Genome Biology 2006, Volume 7, Supplement 1, Article S10 Solovyev et al. http://genomebiology.com/2006/7/S1/S10 Genome Biology 2006, 7(Suppl 1):S10 promoters, otherwise the value of LDF for TATA-less promoters. Only one prediction with the highest LDF score and that is greater then a certain threshold is selected within any 300 bp region.
Examples of Fprom predictions are presented in Table 8.
The distances between true TSSs and correctly predicted ones varied from matching exactly to 151 bp. It should be noted that experimental mapping of TSSs has the estimated precision of ± 5 bp [20].
Testing Fprom on a control set of 366 TATA and 650 TATAless promoter sequences demonstrated that the program identified 80% of TATA promoter sequences, with one false positive prediction per 2,000 bp, and 50% of TATA-less promoters, with one false positive prediction per 650 bp. The prediction algorithm described above uses the propensities of each Transcription Factor (TF) binding site [21] independently, not taking into account their mutual orientation and positioning. At the same time, it is well known that transcription regulation is a highly cooperative process, involving simultaneous binding of several transcription factors to their corresponding sites. In future algorithms, we should analyze patterns of regulatory sequences where mutual orientation and location of individual regulatory elements are necessary requirements for their function.
Prediction of genes, ORFs, promoters, and splice sites using the methods described above is available via the web. Fgenesh (ab initio gene finding program with parameters for 27 organisms), Fgenesh-M (program for prediction of alternative spliced gene variants), Fgenesh+ (gene prediction based on protein homology), Fgenesh_c (gene prediction with EST support), and Fgenesh2 (gene prediction with support of second, homologous genome sequence) can be found at [22]. Prot_map and Est_map (mapping protein or mRNA/ EST, correspondingly, to a genome with exon-intron gene structure reconstruction) is available at [23]. Finding promoter sequences and transcription start sites by Fprom can be executed at [24]. Pseudogene finding software (PSF) is available as a part of Windows-based Molquest package [25] that includes more than a hundred sophisticated sequence analysis programs, including several pipelines and complex visualization components for computational work with biomedical data.