Background: Assignment of function to new molecular sequence data is an essential step in genomics projects. The usual process involves similarity searches of a given sequence against one or more databases, an arduous process for large datasets. Results: We present AutoFACT, a fully automated and customizable annotation tool that assigns biologically informative functions to a sequence. Key features of this tool are that it (1) analyzes nucleotide and protein sequence data; (2) determines the most informative functional description by combining multiple BLAST reports from several user-selected databases; (3) assigns putative metabolic pathways, functional classes, enzyme classes, GeneOntology terms and locus names; and (4) generates output in HTML, text and GFF formats for the user's convenience. We have compared AutoFACT to four well-established annotation pipelines. The error rate of functional annotation is estimated to be only between 1
Liisa B. Koski, Michael W. Gray, B. Franz Lang, Ge