(190az) Raps: Rapid Annotation of Photosynthetic Systems

With advances in sequencing technologies, the bottleneck is no longer our ability to sequence genomes but to annotate them. Model organisms, such as E. coli and yeast, have large communities of researchers to continuously study and improve annotations of the genome. These efforts benefit the larger community of researchers studying genomes because many annotations are based on homology to these model systems. Photosynthetic organisms, such as algae and cyanobacteria, have unique traits and metabolic functions which are not usually captured by comparing DNA sequences to heterotrophic bacteria. Manual curation of genomes is time consuming and expensive, therefore, duplication of manual curation efforts should be avoided. Therefore, we have developed an automated pipeline focused specifically on rapid annotation of photosynthetic organisms leveraging previous genomic annotations and metabolic models and standardizing reaction names and metabolic abbreviations. The output of our algorithm is a genome-scale metabolic model which can then be used for flux balance analysis.