TY - JOUR T1 - Biocuration as an undergraduate training experience: Improving the annotation of the insect vector of Citrus greening disease JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/099168 SP - 099168 AU - Surya Saha AU - Prashant S Hosmani AU - Krystal Villalobos-Ayala AU - Sherry Miller AU - Teresa Shippy AU - Andrew Rosendale AU - Chris Cordola AU - Tracey Bell AU - Hannah Mann AU - Gabe DeAvila AU - Daniel DeAvila AU - Zachary Moore AU - Kyle Buller AU - Kathryn Ciolkevich AU - Samantha Nandyal AU - Robert Mahoney AU - Joshua Von Voorhis AU - Megan Dunlevy AU - David Farrow AU - David Hunter AU - Taylar Morgan AU - Kayla Shore AU - Victoria Guzman AU - Allison Izsak AU - Danielle E Dixon AU - Liliana Cano AU - Andrew Cridge AU - Shannon Johnson AU - Brandi L Cantarel AU - Stephen Richardson AU - Adam English AU - Nan Leng AU - Xiaolong Cao AU - Haobo Jiang AU - Chris Childers AU - Mei-Ju Chen AU - Mirella Flores AU - Wayne Hunter AU - Michelle Cilia AU - Lukas A Mueller AU - Monica Munoz-Torres AU - David Nelson AU - Monica F. Poelchau AU - Josh Benoit AU - Helen Wiersma-Koch AU - Tom D’elia AU - Susan J Brown Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/01/09/099168.abstract N2 - The Asian citrus psyllid (Diaphorina citri Kuwayama) is the insect vector of the bacterium Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus (CLas), the pathogen associated with citrus Huanglongbing (HLB, citrus greening). HLB threatens citrus production worldwide. Suppression or reduction of the insect vector using chemical insecticides has been the primary method to inhibit the spread of citrus greening disease. Accurate structural and functional annotation of the Asian citrus psyllid genome, as well as a clear understanding of the interactions between the insect and CLas, are required for development of new molecular-based HLB control methods. A draft assembly of the D. citri genome has been generated and annotated with automated pipelines. However, knowledge transfer from well-curated reference genomes such as that of Drosophila melanogaster to newly sequenced ones is challenging due to the complexity and diversity of insect genomes. To identify and improve gene models as potential targets for pest control, we manually curated several gene families with a focus on genes that have key functional roles in D. citri biology and CLas interactions. This community effort produced 530 manually curated gene models across developmental, physiological, RNAi regulatory, and immunity-related pathways. As previously shown in the pea aphid, RNAi machinery genes putatively involved in the microRNA pathway have been specifically duplicated. A comprehensive transcriptome enabled us to identify a number of gene families that are either missing or misassembled in the draft genome. In order to develop biocuration as a training experience, we included undergraduate and graduate students from multiple institutions, as well as experienced annotators from the insect genomics research community. The resulting gene set (OGS v1.0) combines both automatically predicted and manually curated gene models. All data are available on https://citrusgreening.org/. ER -