P-GRe: An efficient pipeline for pseudogenes annotation

Formerly considered as part of “junk DNA”, pseudogenes are nowadays known for their role in the post-transcriptional regulation of functional genes. Their identification also contributes to a better understanding of gene evolution, particularly in relation to adaptive responses and the evolution of multigene families. Despite this, there is, to our knowledge, no fully automatic pipeline allowing annotation of the pseudogenes on a whole genome. Here, we propose a new software named Pseudo-Gene Retriever (P-GRe). This is a completely automated pseudogene prediction tool requiring only a genome sequence, its corresponding GFF annotation file, and a protein sequences file. The aligner miniprot has been integrated in our pipeline, because of its high speed and sensitivity. With several filtering and post-analysis steps P-GRe outperforms existing software, while being more sensitive and bringing the new capacity of annotating unitary pseudogenes. • P-GRe enables rapid and accurate annotation of pseudogenes. • The precise reconstruction of their structure makes it possible to find the sequence of the peptide coded by the pseudogene. • Pseudogenes can be classified according to their mechanism of apparition, including unitary pseudogenes.