Motivation: Artemis and Artemis Comparison Tool (ACT) have become mainstream
tools for viewing and annotating sequence data, particularly for microbial genomes. Since its
first release, Artemis has been continuously developed and supported with additional
functionality for editing and analysing sequences based on feedback from an active user community
of laboratory biologists and professional annotators. Nevertheless, its utility has been somewhat
restricted by its limitation to reading and writing from flat files. Therefore, a new version of
Artemis has been developed, which reads from and writes to a relational database schema, and
allows users to annotate more complex, often large and fragmented, genome sequences.
Results: Artemis and ACT have now been extended to read and write directly to
the Generic Model Organism Database (GMOD, http://www.gmod.org) Chado relational database schema.
In addition, a Gene Builder tool has been developed to provide structured forms and tables to
edit coordinates of gene models and edit functional annotation, based on standard ontologies,
controlled vocabularies and free text.
Availability: Artemis and ACT are freely available (under a GPL licence) for
download (for MacOSX, UNIX and Windows) at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute web sites:
http://www.sanger.ac.uk/Software/Artemis/ http://www.sanger.ac.uk/Software/ACT/
Contact: artemis@sanger.ac.uk
Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at
Bioinformatics online.