GenSAS v5.1 released on January 5, 2018.
The Genome Sequence Annotation Server v5.1 (GenSAS, www.gensas.org) is a web-based annotation and curation platform that combines several common annotation tools into one easy-to-use, integrated resource. The user-friendly interfaces, with embedded instructions, guide users through the annotation process. GenSAS has annotation tools for eukaryotes and prokaryotes and supports model and non-model organisms. Users can upload a variety of evidence files to support the annotation process for their genome sequence. These include GFF3 files of aligned features and previous annotations; FASTA files of repeat, transcript, EST, or protein sequences; and gene models from Genbank. GenSAS also allows users to upload Illumina RNA-Seq reads, align the reads to the genome using TopHat, and use the data to train the gene model prediction program Augustus, which allows for more accurate gene models for eukaryotic genomes, especially non-model organisms. JBrowse and Apollo are integrated into GenSAS allowing structural annotation results to be easily viewed and manual curation to be performed. Users can share GenSAS projects with other users enabling collaborative or community wide curation. GenSAS also has a functional annotation step to assign protein functions and identify functional domains for the official gene set. After the annotation process is complete, the final step of the GenSAS pipeline generates the required files for publication which includes merging the manual annotations from Apollo into the final annotation.