•     Welcome to Manatee!
    Welcome to the Manatee page from the Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS) at the University of Maryland School of Medicine
    Introduction
    Manatee is a web-based tool used to perform manual functional annotation. It has been specifically designed to optimize the ability of curators to evaluate all available sequence-based and experimental data to assign the best possible annotation to a given gene product. Manatee allows users to view, modify, and store annotation through interactions with an underlying relational database where all of the information is stored. Manatee supports the storage of multiple types of functional annotation including protein names, gene symbols, EC numbers, Gene Ontology terms, and associated supporting evidence. In addition, Manatee provides summary views of statistics and information from the genome as a whole.

    History
    Manatee was originally developed at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR). In the mid-1990's Owen White wrote the predecessor to Manatee, a tool used for manual annotation in-house at TIGR. Over time this tool evolved into the open source tool called Manatee and was first released to the public on Fri, Aug 30, 2002 (version 1.4.5). At TIGR, Manatee was engineered to work with a custom-designed relational database schema unique to TIGR. That version of Manatee is still in use at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI, which TIGR was merged into in 2006).

    The IGS version of Manatee
    At IGS we have developed a version of Manatee that uses the chado relational database schema; the schema developed by the Generic Model Organism Database GMOD group and which is the standard used by many bioinformatics tools (such as Apollo and Artemis). This version of Manatee includes several tools and features not found in the original software. These include: the ability to automatically create Gene Ontology association and GenBank files, the availability of downloadable annotation and sequence files, and the ability to Blast sequences against the predicted proteins, predicted coding sequences, or whole genome sequence of your organism. Coming soon will be links to Pathway Tools metabolic analysis specific to each genome.

    Screenshots
  • Getting Started

    • Installation Instructions The installation instructions provide full documentation on how to download and install Manatee and all required software.

    • Software and Hardware Requirements A list of required software and hardware specs necessary to run Manatee successfully.

    • User's Documentation Powerpoints and other documents educating the user on how to use Manatee to annotate genes in a genome.

    • Subscribe to the Manatee User's List It is recommended that all Manatee users subscribe to the Manatee User's List to receieve information on new releases, updates, and other news. Please feel free to send an email to the group if you have any general questions that you wish to ask the Manatee Users.

    • Forums Browse the forums to find out if other users are having the same issues as you. Also, feel free to post any tips or tricks you might have implemented that will be helpful to other users.

    • Manatee Support Problem? Please submit a support request and the Manatee team will get back to you ASAP to address the issue.