. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2015 Mar 5.

Published in final edited form as: Curr Protoc Bioinformatics. 2010 Dec;0 9:Unit–9.13. doi: 10.1002/0471250953.bi0913s32

Table 9.13.1.

Description of columns in GFF3 format

Column	Description
Reference sequence name	Name of the sequence that the feature is defined on (commonly a chromosome or contig)
Source	The source of the feature. For features that were generated by software, this is commonly the name of the software; for human-curated features, this is commonly the name of the group performing the curation (e.g., a model organism database)
Type	The type of the feature from the Sequence Ontology (http://www.sequenceontology.org/)
Start	The start position of the feature
End	The end position of the feature
Score	`(optional)` The score of the feature
Strand	`(optional)` The strand on which the feature occurs
Phase	`(optional)` The phase of the feature (e.g., for CDS features, indicates that the first full codon in the feature starts this many bases after the start of the feature)
Attributes	`(optional)` A set of name=value pairs specifying information not contained within the other GFF columns (often contains Name and ID information)