遗传学与基因组杂志

Commentary on ORTHOSCOPE: A Web Tool for Genome Comparisons

Abstract

Jun Inoue

The recent rapid growth of genomic data has made it possible to identify genes having the same inferred function, even among distantly related species, such as humans and invertebrates. Assessing evolutionary relationships provides a way to interpolate or extrapolate gene attributes among species [1]. For such evolutionary analyses, we developed a web tool called ORTHOSCOPE [2]. By uploading gene sequences of interest and by selecting species genomes from >450 bilaterians (Figure 1), users can infer their functions and copy numbers, according to results reported by ORTHOSCOPE in the form of gene trees. That is, ORTHOSCOPE can estimate the evolutionary history of a gene with one click.