CITATION.bib

@ARTICLE{Schwengers2021-fd,
title = "Bakta: rapid and standardized annotation of bacterial genomes via alignment-free sequence identification",
author = "Schwengers, Oliver and Jelonek, Lukas and Dieckmann, Marius Alfred and Beyvers, Sebastian and Blom, Jochen and Goesmann, Alexander",
abstract = "Command-line annotation software tools have continuously gained popularity compared to centralized online services due to the worldwide increase of sequenced bacterial genomes. However, results of existing command-line software pipelines heavily depend on taxon-specific databases or sufficiently well annotated reference genomes. Here, we introduce Bakta, a new command-line software tool for the robust, taxon-independent, thorough and, nonetheless, fast annotation of bacterial genomes. Bakta conducts a comprehensive annotation workflow including the detection of small proteins taking into account replicon metadata. The annotation of coding sequences is accelerated via an alignment-free sequence identification approach that in addition facilitates the precise assignment of public database cross-references. Annotation results are exported in GFF3 and International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC)-compliant flat files, as well as comprehensive JSON files, facilitating automated downstream analysis. We compared Bakta to other rapid contemporary command-line annotation software tools in both targeted and taxonomically broad benchmarks including isolates and metagenomic-assembled genomes. We demonstrated that Bakta outperforms other tools in terms of functional annotations, the assignment of functional categories and database cross-references, whilst providing comparable wall-clock runtimes. Bakta is implemented in Python 3 and runs on MacOS and Linux systems. It is freely available under a GPLv3 license at https://github.com/oschwengers/bakta. An accompanying web version is available at https://bakta.computational.bio.",
journal = "Microbial genomics",
volume =  7,
number =  11,
month =  nov,
year =  2021,
language = "en",
issn = "2057-5858",
pmid = "34739369",
doi = "10.1099/mgen.0.000685"
}