Miriam Land of the DOE Joint Genome Institute at Oak Ridge National Laboratory gives a talk on the current state and future challenges of moving toward automated microbial genome annotation at the "Sequencing, Finishing, Analysis in the Future" meeting in Santa Fe, NM on May 29, 2009.

The methodologies used to generate genome and metagenome annotations are diverse and vary between groups and laboratories. Descriptions of the annotation process are helpful in interpreting genome annotation data. Some groups have produced Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that describe the annotation process, but standards are lacking for structure and content of these descriptions. A general structure for SOP documents that are relevant to genome annotation, metagenomics, environmental...