GrailEXP is a software package that predicts exons, genes, promoters, polyas, CpG islands, EST similarities, and repetitive elements within DNA sequence. GrailEXP was originally developed the Biosciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to annotate the entire known portion of the human genome (including both finished and draft data).

Version 6.2 was created by John Eblen, Dr. George Maalouf, Ray Surface, and Dr. Ed Uberbacher. EXP6, formerly proprietary software of Genomix Corporation, Oak Ridge, TN, is a highly accurate, robust gene finder. EXP6 combines the strengths of various techniques for gene finding into one package to try and be as accurate as possible. It first uses statistical techniques to pinpoint possible locations of exons. Then it brings in empirical evidence from nucleotide and protein databases to create possible "pieces" of genes. Finally, an intelligent algorithm constructs the genes from these pieces. At Genomix, we spent a great deal of effort over a span of nearly two years improving EXP6, especially the final algorithm to construct the genes.

EXP6 is now free software under the GPL license. The software is no longer supported by anyone from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory but is still available for download using the download link.

If you are interested in microbial genome analysis and annotation, you should go to the Prodigal home page.