CRISPRdigger: detecting CRISPRs with better direct repeat annotations

Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPRs) are important genetic elements in many bacterial and archaeal genomes, and play a key role in prokaryote immune systems’ fight against invasive foreign elements. The CRISPR system has also been engineered to facilitate target gene editing in eukaryotic genomes. Using the common features of mis-annotated CRISPRs in prokaryotic genomes, this study proposed an accurate de novo CRISPR annotation program CRISPRdigger, which can take a partially assembled genome as its input. A comprehensive comparison with the three existing programs demonstrated that CRISPRdigger can recover more Direct Repeats (DRs) for CRISPRs and achieve a higher accuracy for a query genome. The program was implemented by Perl and all the parameters had default values, so that a user could annotate CRISPRs in a query genome by supplying only a genome sequence in the FASTA format. All the supplementary data are available at http://www.healthinformaticslab.org/supp/.