VIGA: a sensitive, precise and automatic de novo VIral Genome Annotator

Abstract

Viral (meta)genomics is a rapidly growing field of study that is hampered by an inability to annotate the majority of viral sequences; therefore, the development of new bioinformatic approaches is very important. Here, we present a new automatic de novo genome annotation pipeline, called VIGA, to annotate prokaryotic and eukaryotic viral sequences from (meta)genomic studies. VIGA was benchmarked on a database of known viral genomes and a viral metagenomics case study. VIGA generated the most accurate outputs according to the number of coding sequences and their coordinates, outputs also had a lower number of non-informative annotations compared to other programs.