StartLink+: Prediction of Gene Starts in Prokaryotic Genomes by an Algorithm Integrating Independent Sources of Evidence

Abstract

Algorithms of ab initio gene finding were shown to make sufficiently accurate predictions in prokaryotic genomes. Nonetheless, for up to 15-25% of genes per genome the gene start predictions might differ even when made by the supposedly most accurate tools. To address this discrepancy, we have introduced StartLink+, an approach combining ab initio and multiple sequence alignment based methods. StartLink+ makes predictions for a majority of genes per genome (73% on average); in tests on sets of genes with experimentally verified starts the StartLink+ accuracy was shown to be 98-99%. When StartLink+ predictions made for a large set of prokaryotic genomes were compared with the database annotations we observed that on average the gene start annotations deviated from the predictions for ~5% of genes in AT-rich genomes and for 10-15% of genes in GC-rich genomes.