[Colloquium] Seminar Announcement: NIH/NCBI Dr. Galperin's seminar

[Ninfa Mayorga]

Michael Galperin
NCBI, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD
Friday, November 21, 2014
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM / KCBD Auditorium 1103 
Host: Natalia Maltsev, Department of Human Genetics

Title: Improving microbial genome annotation, one COG at a time

NCBI, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD
Microbial genome sequencing projects continue to flood public databases with 
sequences of deduced proteins, only a small fraction of which has been or will ever be 
studied experimentally. The only feasible way to assign functions to these proteins is to 
tentatively predict them through computational analysis. The Clusters of Orthologous 
Groups of proteins (COGs) database, first created in 1997, has been a popular tool for 
functional annotation, owing to 1) its reliance on complete genomes, which allowed 
unequivocal assignment of orthologs and paralogs, and 2) the family-based approach, 
which used the function(s) of the characterized member(s) of the protein family (COG) 
to assign function(s) to the entire family and describe the range of the potential 
functions when there were more than one. 

A recent update of COG names, the first since 2003, aimed at estimating the 
accuracy of the original COG annotations and evaluating the progress in microbial 
genome annotation in the past twelve years. This study showed that original COG 
assignments had less than 1% error rate. Many tentative COG predictions have now 
been verified, either by direct experiments or through high-throughput methods. 
Functional assignments for many widespread conserved proteins revealed their roles in 
translation, including rRNA maturation and tRNA modification. In this talk, I will discuss 
some of the lessons from the COG re-annotation and the status of bacterial genome 
annotation in general. 

Biography
Dr. Michael Y. Galperin is the Lead Scientist at the NIH NCBI. He has published over
180 research papers, reviews and book chapters and is an author of a textbook on 
comparative genomics. He serves as the Executive editor of the Nucleic Acids 
Research annual Database Issue and the editor of the Genomics Updates section in 
Environmental Microbiology. 


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