MGERT: A pipeline to retrieve coding sequences of mobile genetic elements from genome assemblies

Abstract

Background: Genomes of eukaryotes are inhabited by myriads of mobile genetic elements (MGEs) - transposons and retrotransposons - which play a great role in genome plasticity and evolution. A lot of computational tools were developed to annotate them either in genomic assemblies or raw reads using de novo or homology-based approaches. But there has been no pipeline enabling users to get coding and flanking sequences of MGEs suitable for a downstream analysis from genome assemblies. Results: We developed a new pipeline, MGERT (Mobile Genetic Elements Retrieving Tool), that automates all the steps necessary to obtain protein-coding sequences of mobile genetic elements from genomic assemblies even if no previous knowledge on MGE content of a particular genome is available. Conclusions: Using MGERT, researchers can easily find MGEs, their coding and flanking sequences in the genome of interest. Thus, this pipeline helps researchers to focus on the biological analysis of MGEs rather than excessive scripting and pipelining.