Annotation matters: the effect of structural gene annotation on orthology inference

In silico gene annotation, the process of identifying the genes present in a genome, remains a challenging task. As genome assemblies rapidly increase, the corresponding gene models and repertoires often fall short in quality. Despite advances in annotation methods, a lack of community standards means that most published gene annotations result from ad hoc pipelines. As a result, only a few species have nearly complete and accurate gene models. This annotation quality is thought to affect downstream analyses, including orthology inference, often the first step of comparative genomics studies.

We show that different annotation methods yield markedly distinct orthology inferences. We compared orthology assignments of gene models obtained by four prominent protein-coding gene model sources: the NCBI Eukaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline, the Ensembl Gene Annotation System, the UniProt Reference Proteomes, and Augustus 3.4 (an ab initio pipeline). We observe significant discrepancies between sources, namely in the proportion of orthologous genes per genome, the completeness of Hierarchical Orthologous Groups, and the accuracy and recall of the predicted orthologs on a standard orthology benchmark.