Tuberculosis Community Annotation Project (TBCAP) Jamboree¶
A collaborative Tuberculosis Community Annotation Project (TBCAP) Jamboree has been organized for the first week of March to improve the annotation of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis genome sequence and increase the value of this community resource. It will do so by hosting a forum to which all community members can contribute data and knowledge that will be captured and displayed with respect to the genome sequence, and provide the current TBCAP community members an opportunity to review and revise annotations before they are publicly released.
Prior to the jamboree, all tuberculosis researchers are invited to contribute data from a variety of sources, including data from individual investigator initiated studies as well as large-scale data generation efforts. Examples of the kinds of data and information that will be gathered includes: revised gene predictions; gene names and functions; metabolic, signaling and regulatory pathways; transcription factor binding sites; immune epitopes; polymorphisms, etc. These data will be organized and integrated with other publicly available data through a variety of analytical and visualization tools. Researchers will be invited to join TBCAP working groups organized around major topic areas to review these data. During the Jamboree, TBCAP participants will review these data, identify areas of the annotation requiring additional revision or correction, work to address these issues, and generate a summary of the improved annotation along with recommendations for future work. The revised annotation will be publicly released and submitted to NCBI.
The infrastructure to support the community annotation will be provided through the collaboration of the NIAID funded Genomic Sequencing Center at the Broad Institute, the NIAID funded Bioinformatics Resource Center at Virginia Tech (PATRIC) and the Gates-funded TBDB housed at Stanford and Broad, three groups with considerable experience handling large scale genomic data and building annotation data bases and interfaces to promote community review and revision.
If you have data that would contribute to a more comprehensive annotation of the M. tb. genome and our understanding of the biology of the organism please contact the TBCAP via Patrick Brennan (Patrick.Brennan@colostate.edu).
We hope this Jamboree will be part of an ongoing process in which the TB research community works together to improve the value of the annotation.