OrganellarGenomeDRAW—a suite of tools for generating physical maps of plastid and mitochondrial genomes and visualizing expression data sets

TLDR

Mitochondria and plastids are endosymbiotic organelles that carry their own circular double‑stranded genomes, whose sizes range from ~15–20 kb to over 10 Mb across eukaryotes. The authors developed OGDRAW to generate high‑quality visual maps of circular and linear organellar genomes from GenBank files or accession numbers. OGDRAW accepts any DNA sequence but is optimized for organellar genomes, supports plotting quantitative expression data, and its core components are available as a Perl module for integration into pipelines. OGDRAW is widely used and freely accessible via a web interface.

Abstract

Mitochondria and plastids (chloroplasts) are cell organelles of endosymbiotic origin that possess their own genetic information. Most organellar DNAs map as circular double-stranded genomes. Across the eukaryotic kingdom, organellar genomes display great size variation, ranging from ∼15 to 20 kb (the size of the mitochondrial genome in most animals) to >10 Mb (the size of the mitochondrial genome in some lineages of flowering plants). We have developed OrganellarGenomeDraw (OGDRAW), a suite of software tools that enable users to create high-quality visual representations of both circular and linear annotated genome sequences provided as GenBank files or accession numbers. Although all types of DNA sequences are accepted as input, the software has been specifically optimized to properly depict features of organellar genomes. A recent extension facilitates the plotting of quantitative gene expression data, such as transcript or protein abundance data, directly onto the genome map. OGDRAW has already become widely used and is available as a free web tool (http://ogdraw.mpimp-golm.mpg.de/). The core processing components can be downloaded as a Perl module, thus also allowing for convenient integration into custom processing pipelines.