Throughout 2017, Hélène worked with Manuel Spannagl and David Swarbreck to produce the IWGSC RefSeq annotation v1.0. Resulting from the integration of two gene calling pipelines (TriAnnot and PGSB pipeline), the IWGSC annotation benefits from the complementarity of the two approaches and provides wheat scientists and breeders with the most comprehensive set of wheat genes to date.

Hélène Rimbert is bioinformatics engineer at GDEC (Genetic, Diversity and Ecophysiology of Cereals) Joint Research Unit of Institute of Agronomical Research Institute (INRA) and Clermont-Auvergne University (UCA), based in Clermont-Ferrand, France. Hélène has been involved in several wheat projects, such as the BreedWheat French Stimulus Initiative project, where she worked on the development of an Affymetrix Axiom genotyping SNP array. In 2016 she worked on the annotation of chromosome 1B with TriAnnot, which has been used to improve the whole-genome reference developed by the IWGSC.

As part of the IWGSC Annotation team, Hélène worked on the annotation of the IWGSC RefSeq v1.0 with the automated annotation pipeline TriAnnot. Initially developed by Phillippe Leroy and colleagues as an automated modular pipeline for the annotation of complex plant genomes, Triannot was used in 2014 to annotate chromosome 3B (Choulet et al., 2014) and has now been applied to the whole genome. Triannot generated annotation of transposable elements and structural and functional annotation of protein-coding genes. Subsequently, Hélène has developed automated scripts for updating automated gene models with manually curated data.

The 107,886 high confidence gene models annotated in IWGSC RefSeq annotation v1.0, together with sets of less-well supported gene models and pseudogenes are available for BLAST searches, download or in browser format with supporting evidence at URGI, INRA Versailles. As the data are used and revised over time the models will be updated to maintain a highly useful resource for the community.