QuickProt: A Fast and Accurate Homology-Based Protein Annotation Tool for Non-Model Organism Genomes

Abstract

Despite the increasing number of genomes, the annotation of protein-coding genes is still lacking. In some genomes where transcriptome data is not available, various tools have been developed to annotate genes based on homologous proteins, but each tool has its limitations. Here, we propose quickprot, a user-friendly command-line tool that constructs a set of redundancy-free gene models from the target genome based on the homologous protein sequences of a set of closely related species. We tested its applicability in stonefish, and the results showed that it has high accuracy and runs faster than existing tools. This low-cost, high-precision annotation method is expected to become a useful tool for genome annotation, which will contribute to the research of comparative genomics. The software is implemented in Python and licensed under the MIT License. The source code, documentation, and tutorials can be obtained at https://github.com/thecgs/quickprot.