Nucleic Acids Research
DDBJ in collaboration with mass-sequencing teams on annotation
Y. Tateno, N. Saitou, K. Okubo, H. Sugawara and T. Gojobori
Nucleic Acids Res. 33:25-28, 2005.
doi:10.1093/nar/gki020

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Nucleic Acids Research, 2005, Vol. 33, Database issue D25–D28
doi:10.1093/nar/gki020

DDBJ in collaboration with mass-sequencing teams
on annotation
Y. Tateno*, N. Saitou1, K. Okubo, H. Sugawara and T. Gojobori
Center for Information Biology and DNA Data Bank of Japan and 1Laboratory of Evolutionary Genetics, National
Institute of Genetics, Research Organization of Information and Systems, Yata, Mishima, 411-8540, Japan
Received September 15, 2004; Revised and Accepted September 17, 2004

ABSTRACTIn the past year, we at DDBJ (DNA Data Bank of Japan;
http://www.ddbj.nig.ac.jp) collected and released
1 066 084 entries or 718 072 425 bases including thewhole chromosome 22 of chimpanzee, the wholegenome shotgun sequences of silkworm and various
others. On the other hand, we hosted workshops forhuman full-length cDNA annotation and participatedin jamborees of mouse full-length cDNA annotation.
The annotated data are made public at DDBJ. We arealso in collaboration with a RIKEN team to accept andrelease the CAGE (Cap Analysis Gene Expression)
data under a new category, MGA (Mass Sequencesfor Genome Annotation). The data will be useful forstudying gene expression control in many aspects.

INTRODUCTION
As one of the International Nucleotide Sequence Databases(INSD), DDBJ’s primary mission is undoubtedly to collect,annotate and release the original and authentic DNA sequence
data. In fact, the amount of data collected and released by
DDBJ has continued to grow. However, annotation has notcaught up with these activities. The reason for that may be
attributed to our limited labor power and knowledge that cannot meet biological examination and verification of all submitted data, though this may not be our task. At any rate, thisproblem will unfortunately remain to be resolved.
Fortunately, however, there have been other approaches to
conducting annotation at DDBJ. One of them is to hold or
participate in a workshop at which a number of experts systematically annotate some specified data. We actively participatedin the annotation jamborees, FANTOM I and II, to annotate
and release mouse full-length cDNAs (1). We also hosted theworkshops, H-Invitational I and II, to annotate 21 037 humanfull-length cDNAs (2). The data annotated at the workshops
have been made public on http://hinv.ddbj.nig.ac.jp/
index.html at DDBJ and on another site at the Japan Biological

Information Research Center (JBIRC). Accordingly, we haveupdated our home page as shown in Figure 1. The numbers ofaccesses to the H-Invitational data and our paper (2) indicatethat both have apparently made a great impact on researchcommunities of biology, medicine and others. A similar activity is in the process for rice genome annotation. As anotherapproach, we are in collaboration with a research team of
RIKEN to process and release their data that will be usefulfor annotation of genome data from different angles.
In this paper, we report our primary activity of data collection and release in the past year and our approach to thecollaboration in genome annotation.

RECENT TRENDS IN DATA SUBMISSION
In the past year, we at DDBJ collected and released 1 066 084
entries or 718 072 425 bases. This includes the complete chromosome 22 sequence data of chimpanzee, Pan troglodyte. The
chimpanzee chromosome was sequenced and submitted by
two Japanese, three German, one Chinese, one Korean and
one Taiwanese groups (3). This is the first case of data submission for the entire chromosome of non-human primates.
Contrary to our expectation for the genetic similarity between
man and chimpanzee (4), the new data revealed that 83% of
the coding sequences on the corresponding chromosomes differed at the amino acid level between the two species. This
would make the relationship between the two species more
complicated and interesting than previously considered. Also
included is the whole-genome shotgun (WGS) data of silkworm, Bombyx mori, submitted by the Silkworm Genome
Research Program of the National Institute of Agrobiological
Sciences, Japan (5). It covers about 80% of the whole genomeof the species.
In addition to the data collection and release, we edit all thedata made public by INSD (DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank) and publish as a DDBJ release four times a year. The main reason for
editing and publishing the release is to regularly take statisticsof the submitted data to INSD in several aspects. For example,
the most recent one published as release 58 in June 2004

*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +81 55 981 6857; Fax: +81 55 981 6858; Email: ytateno@genes.nig.ac.jp
The online version of this article has been published under an open access model. Users are entitled to use, reproduce, disseminate, or display the open accessversion of this article for non-commercial purposes provided that: the original authorship is properly and fully attributed; the Journal and Oxford University Press
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ª 2005, the authors

Nucleic Acids Research, Vol. 33, Database issue ª Oxford University Press 2005; all rights reserved

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Nucleic Acids Research, 2005, Vol. 33, Database issue

Figure 1. New home page of DDBJ.

contains 34 917 581 entries or 39 812 635 108 bases. Release58 also shows that the total number of bases increased by 73
billion bases in the past year or 1.23 times as large as thenumber of the last year.
To indicate the recent trends in data submissions, we
extracted and obtained the statistics focusing on the top
nine species in the past four years, from 2001 to 2004. The

result is given in Figure 2. It is clear from the figure that
Homo sapiens have been ranked top in the past 4 years.
Human genes and genomic regions have been extensively
sequenced and submitted even after the completion of humangenome sequencing in 2001 (6). The H-Invitational I and II
workshops mentioned above apparently contributed to maintaining the human data highest. With the accumulation of

Nucleic Acids Research, 2005, Vol. 33, Database issue

D27

COLLECTION OF DATA FOR GENOME
ANNOTATION

Figure 2. Recent trends in data submission. Successions of data submissions in
the past four years are shown for the top nine species. H. s., Homo sapiens;
M. m., Mus musculus; R. n., Rattus norvegicus; D. r., Danio rerio; Z. m., Zea
mays; D. m., Drosophila melanogaster; O. s., Oryza sativa; G. g., Gallus gallus;
A. t., Arabidopsis thaliana.

chimpanzee genome data, human genes and genomic regions
will further be sequenced and studied to clarify what makes
man a man at the genome level.
The mouse, Mus musculus, and rat, Rattus norvegicus, data
steeply increased in the past years. The two rodent species
have been recognized and used as the model experimental
animals closest to man. This tendency has particularly beenstrengthened with some recent genome-scale works for the
species (7,8). Below the three major species, several species
are clustered in Figure 2. Among them zebrafish, Danio rerio,
is slightly ahead, indicating that the fish has recently beenrecognized as the most suitable model system for genetic
study of vertebrate development (9). In the cluster, there
are three plant species in which maize, Zea mays, has been
more extensively sequenced than the other two species, Oryza
sativa and Arabidopsis thaliana.
The trends in the data submissions in Figure 2 clearly
demonstrate that as research for a particular species progresses, sequence data of the species are produced and accumulate accordingly, which further stimulates the research toadvance, and so forth. Data sharing certainly promotes the
progress of research. This should be truly understood bythose who are not willing to share their data with others.

With the accumulation of genome sequence data at INSD,
genome research has turned also on non-coding regions
such as 50 UTRs and microRNA regions. Those regions are
known to be responsible for regulation of gene expression.
However, their roles have not exactly been understood. For
example, no one knows completely about how gene expression
is regulated at the promoter region. The regulation of gene
expression is unquestionably important for understanding
many aspects in biology, including development, metabolism,aging and speciation for closely related species. With this inmind, a RIKEN team sequenced a huge number of expressedsequences in 50 UTR, CAGE (Cap Analysis Gene Expression)
sequences, for mouse (10) and plans to submit the data to
DDBJ. A CAGE sequence more specifically is the initial
20 bases from a 50 end mRNA. CAGE is expected to produce
10 000 to 500 000 sequences in a tissue of a species, whichmakes it possible to conduct high-throughput analysis of gene
expression, profiling of transcriptional start points and others.
At the collaborative meeting of INSD in 2004, we thus
proposed a new division to accept and release the CAGE
data and those similar to them, because we understood andexpected that the data would be crucially important for studying comprehensive aspects of promoter usage. The new division was finally accepted and named MGA (Mass sequencesfor Genome Annotation). The definition of MGA is thesequences that are produced in large quantity in view of genome annotation. MGA thus includes sets of short sequencesthat are meaningful in the genome context, such as sequencesfrom libraries of CpG islands (11–12) and DNase hypersensitive sites (13–14).

CONCLUDING REMARKSAs gene expression research rapidly advances, microarray data
have accumulated at many individual laboratories. Some ofthe data were submitted to the public databases such as
ArrayExpress, GEO and CIBEX. The open letter (15) sentby the MGED (Microarray Gene Expression Data) Society
to the editors of relevant journals will certainly accelerate
data submission to the public databases. Then the user ofthe public gene expression databases will demand the link
between the gene expression databases and INSD, because
they naturally need information not only on gene expression but also on the relevant DNA sequences. Perhaps,
discussion about gene expression will not be settled until
information on the pertinent DNA sequences is provided.
Currently, the only vehicle connecting these two types ofthe databases is the accession number issued by INSD.

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