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Abstract Background The improvements in genomics methods coupled with readily accessible high-throughput sequencing have contributed to our understanding of microbial species, metagenomes, infectious diseases and more. To maximize the impact of these genomics studies, it is important that data from biological samples will become publicly available with standardized metadata. The availability of data at public archives provides the hope that greater insights could be obtained through integration with multi-omics data, reproducibility of published studies, or meta-analyses of large diverse datasets. These datasets should include a description of the host, organism, environmental source of the specimen, spatial-temporal information and other relevant metadata, but unfortunately these attributes are often missing and when present, they show inconsistencies in the use of metadata standards and ontologies. Results METAGENOTE ( https://metagenote.niaid.nih.gov ) is a web portal that greatly facilitates the annotation of samples from genomic studies and streamlines the submission process of sequencing files and metadata to the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) (Leinonen R, et al, Nucleic Acids Res, 39:D19-21, 2011) for public access. This platform offers a wide selection of packages for different types of biological and experimental studies with a special emphasis on the standardization of metadata reporting. These packages follow the guidelines from the MIxS standards developed by the Genomics Standard Consortium (GSC) and adopted by the three partners of the International Nucleotides Sequencing Database Collaboration (INSDC) (Cochrane G, et al, Nucleic Acids Res, 44:D48-50, 2016) - National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) and the DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ). METAGENOTE then compiles, validates and manages the submission through an easy-to-use web interface minimizing submission errors and eliminating the need for submitting sequencing files via a separate file transfer mechanism. Conclusions METAGENOTE is a public resource that focuses on simplifying the annotation and submission process of data with its corresponding metadata. Users of METAGENOTE will benefit from the easy to use annotation interface but most importantly will be encouraged to publish metadata following standards and ontologies that make the public data available for reuse.

Cylinder deactivation is a fuel economy improvement technology that has attracted particular attention recently. The currently produced cylinder deactivation engines utilize fixed-type cylinder deactivation in which only a fixed number of cylinders are deactivated. As fixed-type cylinder deactivation has some shortcomings, variable-type cylinder deactivation with no limit on the number of deactivated cylinders is under research. For variable-type cylinder deactivation, control is more complicated and production cost is higher than fixed-type cylinder deactivation. Therefore, it is necessary to select the cylinder deactivation control method considering both advantages and disadvantages of the two control methods. In this study, a fuel economy prediction simulation model was created using the measurement data of various vehicles with engine displacements of 1.0⁻5.0 L. The fuel economy improvement of fixed-type cylinder deactivation was compared with that of variable-type cylinder deactivation using the created simulation. As a result of examining the fuel economy improvement of the test vehicle in the FTP-75 driving cycle, the improvement was 2.2⁻10.0% for fixed-type cylinder deactivation and 2.2⁻12.8% for variable-type cylinder deactivation. Furthermore, the effect of the engine load on fuel economy improvement under cylinder deactivation and the effect of changes in engine control were examined via a simulation.