Gene Ontology Meta Annotator for Plants (GOMAP)

Annotating gene structures and functions to genome assemblies is necessary to make assembly resources useful for biological inference. Gene Ontology (GO) term assignment is the most used functional annotation system, and new methods for GO assignment have improved the quality of GO-based function predictions. The Gene Ontology Meta Annotator for Plants (GOMAP) is an optimized, high-throughput, and reproducible pipeline for genome-scale GO annotation of plants. We containerized GOMAP to increase portability and reproducibility and also optimized its performance for HPC environments. Here we report on the pipeline's availability and performance for annotating large, repetitive plant genomes and describe how GOMAP was used to annotate multiple maize genomes as a test case. Assessment shows that GOMAP expands and improves the number of genes annotated and annotations assigned per gene as well as the quality (based on F-max) of GO assignments in maize. GOMAP has been deployed to annotate other species including wheat, rice, barley, cotton, and soy. Instructions and access to the GOMAP Singularity container are freely available online at https://bioinformapping.com/gomap/ . A list of annotated genomes and links to data is maintained at https://dill-picl.org/projects/gomap/.

Automated summary

The GOMAP pipeline is a high-throughput genome-scale GO annotation tool optimized for plants, with containerization increasing portability and reproducibility. Testing on multiple maize genomes showed that GOMAP expands the number of annotated genes and improves the quality of annotations per gene.