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Section: New Software and Platforms
Magus
Keywords: Bioinformatics - Genomic sequence - Knowledge database
Functional Description
Comparative genomics requires efficient and scalable tools for managing knowledge about genomes, genes, and the high-dimensional relations between them.
The MAGUS genome annotation system integrates genome sequences and sequences features, in silico analyses, and views of external data resources into a familiar user interface requiring only a Web navigator. MAGUS implements annotation workflows and enforces curation standards to guarantee consistency and integrity. As a novel feature the system provides a workflow for simultaneous annotation of related genomes through the use of protein families identified by in silico analyses this has resulted in a three-fold increase in curation speed, compared to one-at-a-time curation of individual genes. This allows us to maintain standards of high-quality manual annotation while efficiently using the time of volunteer curators.
MAGUS can be used on small installations with a web server and a relational database on a single machine, or scaled out in clusters or elastic clouds using Apache Cassandra for NoSQL data storage and Apache Hadoop for Map-Reduce.