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Updated: Apr 21, 2026

Agrobacterium-Mediated Immature Embryo Transformation of Recalcitrant Maize Inbred Lines Using Morphogenic Genes
Published on: February 14, 2020
Automated update, revision, and quality control of the maize genome annotations using MAKER-P improves the B73
MeiYee Law1, Kevin L Childs1, Michael S Campbell1
1The Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, Maine 04609 (M.L.);Eccles Institute of Human Genetics (M.L., M.S.C., M.Y.), Department of Biomedical Informatics (M.L.), and USTAR Center for Genetic Discovery (C.H., M.Y.), University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112;Genetics Program (N.P., S.-H.S., N.J.), Department of Plant Biology (K.L.C., S.-H.S.), Department of Computer Science and Engineering (J.L., Y.S.), and Department of Horticulture (N.J.), Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824;iPlant Collaborative, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, New York 11724 (J.C.S., A.J.O., D.W.);Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5G 1L7 (C.H.);Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78758 (D.J.);Department of Genetics, Development, and Cell Biology and Department of Agronomy (C.J.L.), and United States Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service Corn Insects and Crop Genetics Research (C.M.A.), Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011; andUnited States Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service Northeast Area, Robert W. Holley Center for Agriculture and Health, Ithaca, New York 14853 (D.W.).
Abstract:
The large size and relative complexity of many plant genomes make creation, quality control, and dissemination of high-quality gene structure annotations challenging. In response, we have developed MAKER-P, a fast and easy-to-use genome annotation engine for plants. Here, we report the use of MAKER-P to update and revise the maize (Zea mays) B73 RefGen_v3 annotation build (5b+) in less than 3 h using the iPlant Cyberinfrastructure. MAKER-P identified and annotated 4,466 additional, well-supported protein-coding genes not present in the 5b+ annotation build, added additional untranslated regions to 1,393 5b+ gene models, identified 2,647 5b+ gene models that lack any supporting evidence (despite the use of large and diverse evidence data sets), identified 104,215 pseudogene fragments, and created an additional 2,522 noncoding gene annotations. We also describe a method for de novo training of MAKER-P for the annotation of newly sequenced grass genomes. Collectively, these results lead to the 6a maize genome annotation and demonstrate the utility of MAKER-P for rapid annotation, management, and quality control of grasses and other difficult-to-annotate plant genomes.
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