Meeting Report: Towards a Critical Assessment of Functional Annotation Experiment (CAFAE) for bacterial genome annotation

It is widely recognized that, with the advent of very high throughput, short read, and highly parallelized sequencing technologies, the generation of new DNA sequences from microbes, plants, metagenomes is outpacing the ability to assign functions to (“annotate”) all this data. To begin to try to address this, on May 18 and 19, 2010, a team of roughly fifty people met to define and scope the possibility of a first Critical Assessment of Functional Annotation Experiment (CAFAE) for bacterial genome annotation in Crystal City, Virginia. Due to the fundamental importance of genomic data to its mission, the Department of Energy (DOE) BER program hosted this workshop, funding the attendance of all invitees. The workshop was co-organized by Dan Drell and Susan Gregurick (DOE), Owen White and Nikos Kyripides.