TransAnnot-a fast transcriptome annotation pipeline

The annotation of deeply sequenced, de novo assembled transcriptomes continues to be a challenge as some of the state-of-the-art tools are slow, difficult to install, and hard to use. We have tackled these issues with TransAnnot, a fast, automated transcriptome annotation pipeline that is easy to install and use. Leveraging the fast sequence searches provided by the MMseqs2 suite, TransAnnot offers one-step annotation of homologs from Swiss-Prot, gene ontology terms and orthogroups from eggNOG, and functional domains from Pfam. Users also have the option to annotate against custom databases. TransAnnot accepts sequencing reads (short and long), nucleotide sequences, or amino acid sequences as input for annotation. When benchmarked with test data sets of amino acid sequences, TransAnnot was 333, 284, and 18 times faster than comparable tools such as EnTAP, Trinotate, and eggNOG-mapper respectively.

TransAnnot is free to use, open sourced under GPLv3, and is implemented in C++ and Bash. Source code, documentation, and pre-compiled binaries are available at https://github.com/soedinglab/transannot. TransAnnot is also available via bioconda (https://anaconda.org/bioconda/transannot).