Quality Annotations, a Key Frontier in the Microbial Sciences: With genomic sequencing expanding so rapidly, gene annotation lags—posing challenges to catch up while correcting errors as needed

For microbiologists, the sequencing of the genome of the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae in 1995 was a pivotal event, one that transformed the microbiological research enterprise. More than 20 years later, with the genomes of some 85,000 organisms sequenced, including about 70,000 bacterial species, whole genome sequence (WGS) information is being used to design, conduct, and analyze vast numbers of experiments. There is no going back.