Consideration of non-canonical splice sites improves gene prediction on the Arabidopsis thaliana Niederzenz-1 genome sequence

The Arabidopsis thaliana Niederzenz-1 genome sequence was recently published with an ab initio gene prediction. In depth analysis of the predicted gene set revealed some errors involving genes with non-canonical splice sites in their introns. Since non-canonical splice sites are difficult to predict ab initio, we checked for options to improve the annotation by transferring annotation information from the recently released Columbia-0 reference genome sequence annotation Araport11. Incorporation of hints generated from Araport11 enabled the precise prediction of non-canonical splice sites. Manual inspection of RNA-Seq read mapping and RT-PCR were applied to validate the structural annotations of non-canonical splice sites. Predictions of untranslated regions were also updated by harnessing the potential of Araport11's information, which was generated by using high coverage RNA-Seq data. The improved gene set of the Nd-1 genome assembly (GeneSet_Nd-1_v1.1) was evaluated via comparison to the initial gene prediction (GeneSet_Nd-1_v1.0) as well as against Araport11 for the Col-0 reference genome sequence. GeneSet_Nd-1_v1.1 contains previously missed non-canonical splice sites in 1256 genes. Reciprocal best hits for 24,527 (89.4%) of all nuclear Col-0 genes against the GeneSet_Nd-1_v1.1 indicate a high gene prediction quality.