Recently, we have released a new website: AnnotQTL, a web tool designed to gather the functional annotation of different prominent website though limiting the redundancy of information.
The last steps of genetic mapping research programs require to closely analyze several QTL regions to select candidate genes for further studies. Despite the existence of several websites (NCBI genome browser, Ensembl Browser and UCSC Genome browser) or web tools (Biomart, Galaxy) to achieve this task, the selection of candidate genes is still laborious. Indeed, information available on the prominent websites slightly differs in terms of gene prediction and functional annotation, and some other websites provide extra-information that researchers may want to use. Merging and comparing this information can be done manually for one QTL containing few genes but would be hardly possible for many different QTL regions and dozen of genes. Here we propose a web tool that, for the region of interest, merges the list of genes available in NCBI and Ensembl, removes redundancy, adds the functional annotation of different prominent web site and highlights the genes for which the functional annotation fits the biological function or diseases of interest. This tool is dedicated to sequenced livestock animal species (cattle, pig, chicken, and horse) and the dog as they have been extensively studied (indeed, more than 8000 QTL were detected).
The AnnotQTL server could be found here : http://annotqtl.genouest.org/
