Annotation, or the prediction of genes that encode proteins (CDS) and other genomic features such as signal peptides, transmembrane regions, ribosomal binding sites, transfer RNAs and conserved motifs/domains, is not easily automated and still needs to be customized based on the organism of interest and available databases. The bioinformatics group can assist in annotation by setting up and running database searches on the command line against the most common resources (NCBI, Pfam, RefSeq, SMART, PRINTS, COGS, Blast2GO, KEGG, etc. - many of these databases are hosted on our local servers for more efficient searching and higher throughput) and collect them into user-friendly tools such as SQLite and Microsoft Excel for downstream analysis. We can also assist in the development of training sets for gene predictions using GeneMark, GeneMaker, FGENESH, Glimmer, tRNAscan-SE, SNAP and Augustus. For unique or previously undescribed features, we can build custom tools for annotation efforts.