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Thursday, July 16, 2015

Woods: A fast and accurate functional annotator and classifier of genomic and metagenomic sequences

Another recent publication from our lab.

Citation: 

Sharma, A. K., Gupta, A., Kumar, S., Dhakan, D. B., & Sharma, V. K. (2015). Woods: A fast and accurate functional annotator and classifier of genomic and metagenomic sequences. Genomics.

Functional annotation of the gigantic metagenomic data is one of the major time-consuming and computationally demanding tasks, which is currently a bottleneck for the efficient analysis. The commonly used homology-based methods to functionally annotate and classify proteins are extremely slow. 

Therefore, to achieve faster and accurate functional annotation, we have developed an orthology-based functional classifier 'Woods' by using a combination of machine learning and similarity-based approaches. Woods displayed a precision of 98.79% on independent genomic dataset, 96.66% on simulated metagenomic dataset and >97% on two real metagenomic datasets. In addition, it performed >87 times faster than BLAST on the two real metagenomic datasets. Woods can be used as a highly efficient and accurate classifier with high-throughput capability which facilitates its usability on large metagenomic datasets.

The Woods web server is freely accessible at http://metagenomics.iiserb.ac.in/woods/index.php and http://metabiosys.iiserb.ac.in/woods/index.php. The standalone version of Woods can be downloaded from the above web servers and usage instructions are provided in Text S1 and also in the Tutorial section of the web server.