An integrative method for identifying the over-annotated protein-coding genes in microbial genomes

The falsely annotated protein-coding genes have been deemed one of the major causes accounting for the annotating errors in public databases. Although many filtering approaches have been designed for the over-annotated protein-coding genes, some are questionable due to the resultant increase in false negative. Furthermore, there is no webserver or software specifically devised for the problem of over-annotation. In this study, we propose an integrative algorithm for detecting the over-annotated protein-coding genes in microorganisms. Overall, an average accuracy of 99.94% is achieved over 61 microbial genomes. The extremely high accuracy indicates that the presented algorithm is efficient to differentiate the protein-coding genes from the non-coding open reading frames. Abundant analyses show that the predicting results are reliable and the integrative algorithm is robust and convenient. Our analysis also indicates that the over-annotated protein-coding genes can cause the false positive of horizontal gene transfers detection. The webserver of the proposed algorithm can be freely accessible from www.cbi.seu.edu.cn/RPGM.