Dear Artemis users Artemis has been developed by the pathogen informatics team at the Sanger Institute for many years and is heavily used worldwide. As you may know, a decision was taken more than a year ago to stop maintaining Artemis because, due to the age and structure of the codebase, even minimal maintenance has become a full-time job.
Instead, funding has been secured from BBSRC and NSF (to Matt Berriman, Iain Holmes and Kevin Howe) to include the key features of Artemis/ACT into its long-time ‘competitor’ Apollo. The tools are currently quite different: Apollo has strengths in supporting large genomes and distributed annotation using servers, whereas Artemis has unique views and flexibility that have enabled it to become a deep exploration tool as well as an annotation platform. Crucially Apollo is being developed using a modern codebase and the grant will fund a virtual development team based in the UK and US. As we go into this new phase, it will really help the development team to know which features should be prioritised. Some work has already started on the new version of Apollo, enabling it to run from flat-files or servers but we really need to hear from Artemis users. In particular: * In what way do you rely on Artemis for your work? * What functionality do you rely on most? * Could you easily switch to an alternative? * Do you use other annotation/viewing tools (e.g. IGV/Apollo)? In which case, are there particular views or functions where Artemis compares very well or very poorly? * What are the most intuitive features? What are the most counter-intuitive features? I’d welcome any feedback Thanks for your help! Matt Berriman Senior Group Leader, Parasite and Microbes Programme Wellcome Sanger Institute (NB. Soon moving to University of Glasgow)
