A beginner’s Guide to Manual Curation of Transposable Elements

In the study of transposable elements (TEs), the generation of a high confidence set of consensus sequences that represent the diversity of TEs found in a given genome is a key step in the path to investigating these fascinating genomic elements.

Despite the availability of algorithms and pipelines to automatically identify putative TE families present in a genome, producing a library of high-quality full-length TE consensus sequences largely remains a process of manual curation. The knowledge is not easily accessible to all, making it difficult for those outside the field to access this highly specialized skill.

Clement Goubert from C3G Montreal Node and other contributors worked on making that knowledge available to all. They filled this gap by providing a set of detailed computer protocols, software recommendations, and video tutorials for those aiming to manually curate TEs. Detailed step-by-step protocols, aimed at the complete beginner, are presented in the Supplementary Methods.

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Published: May, 10, 2022