Annovar Exonic label

Question

[Juke34]

Hi bioinformatician community,

looking at annovar output I don't understand why they use exonic term while it actually refers to CDS, Looking at the documentation and googling I do not find any mention of that. Nobody never complained about using misleading term in annovar output?

Answer 1

[harold.smith.tarheel]

Exonic is accurate. Genes can contain 5' and/or 3' exons that are not part of the protein-coding sequence. ANNOVAR annotation files are in GenePred format, which includes non-coding exons in the gene description.

[Juke34]

Thank you for pointing the exonic for non-coding genes, that explain probably this choice. But UTRs are part of exons, so the term is not well choosen. They might have provided a clear definiton to avoid confusion:
Exonic for Annovar = CDS for protein coding genes + exon for non-coding genes.