What is a “Subsystem”?
• A “subsystem” is a set of abstract functional roles that an annotator has decided should be thought of as related in some way. A “subsystem” can represent the collection of functional roles that make up a metabolic pathway, a multi-subunit complex (e.g., the ribosome), a specific class of proteins (e.g., signal transduction), or any other set of functional roles that the annotator believes are related in some biologically meaningful way. The “subsystem approach” to high-throughput genome annotation allows an annotator who is an expert on a specific pathway or class of genes to concentrate on their specific domain of expertise as they annotate all detected instances and observed variants of that pathway or class of roles simultaneously, in the entire set of installed SEED genomes, in an automatically consistent fashion.
