targeted projects including curating genes and sequences for Homo sapiens, Mus musculus and other organisms. RefSeq curators improve the quality of the database through review of QA test results, involvement in the selection of certain inputs for genome annotation processing, sequence analysis, taxonomic analysis, and functional review. Curation also supports improvements to genome annotation pipelines as content experts help define programmatic approaches to model both typical and atypical biology. For eukaryotes, particularly mammals, transcript-based curation defines ‘best’ sequence representatives (as ‘known’ RefSeqs; Table 1 footnote) which are used as a primary input reagent to the eukaryotic genome annotation pipeline (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK169439/). Improvements in input reagent quality in turn add significant quality and reproducibility to the resultant genome annotation. This type of manual curation has historically been focused on human and mouse because of their unique biomedical importance (6). More recently these curation efforts have given greater attention to Rattus norvegicus, Danio rerio, Bos taurus, and Gallus gallus. These species are relevant to human health as well as agricultural sustainability.
