Published paper: Distributed annotation of plant pathogenic fungi

Another paper I have co-authored related to the UNITE database for fungal rDNA ITS sequences is now published as an Online Early article in Fungal Diversity. The paper describes an effort to improve the annotation of ITS sequences from fungal plant pathogens. Why is this important? Well, apart from fungal plant pathogens being responsible for great economic losses in agriculture, the paper is also conceptually important as it shows that together we can accomplish a substantial improvement to the metadata in sequence databases. In this work we have hunted down high-quality reference sequences for various plant pathogenic fungi, and re-annotated incorrectly or insufficiently annotated ITS sequences from the same fungal lineages. In total, the 59 authors have made 31,954 changes to UNITE database data, on average 540 changes per author. While one, or a few, persons could not feasibly have made this effort alone, this work shows that in larger consortia vast improvements can be made to the quality of databases, by distributing the work among many scientists. In many ways, this relates to proposals to “wikify” GenBank, and after Rfam and Pfam it might now be time to take the user-contribution model to, at least, the RefSeq portion of GenBank, which despite its description as being “comprehensive, integrated, non-redundant, [and] well-annotated” still contains errors and examples of non-usable annotation. More on that at a later point…

Paper reference:

Nilsson RH, Hyde KD, Pawlowska J, Ryberg M, Tedersoo L, Aas AB, Alias SA, Alves A, Anderson CL, Antonelli A, Arnold AE, Bahnmann B, Bahram M, Bengtsson-Palme J, Berlin A, Branco S, Chomnunti P, Dissanayake A, Drenkhan R, Friberg H, Frøslev TG, Halwachs B, Hartmann M, Henricot B, Jayawardena R, Jumpponen A, Kauserud H, Koskela S, Kulik T, Liimatainen K, Lindahl B, Lindner D, Liu J-K, Maharachchikumbura S, Manamgoda D, Martinsson S, Neves MA, Niskanen T, Nylinder S, Pereira OL, Pinho DB, Porter TM, Queloz V, Riit T, Sanchez-García M, de Sousa F, Stefaczyk E, Tadych M, Takamatsu S, Tian Q, Udayanga D, Unterseher M, Wang Z, Wikee S, Yan J, Larsson E, Larsson K-H, Kõljalg U, Abarenkov K: Improving ITS sequence data for identification of plant pathogenic fungi. Fungal Diversity Online early (2014). doi: 10.1007/s13225-014-0291-8 [Paper link]