Title: Ortholog detection: pathway to comparative genomics

Authors: Manpreet Singh; Shaifu Gupta

Addresses: Department of Information Technology, Guru Nanak Dev Engineering College, Ludhiana, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Guru Nanak Dev Engineering College, Ludhiana, India

Abstract: Accurate detection of orthologs is a key aspect of comparative genomics. Orthologs can be used to predict the function of newly sequenced genes from the model organisms as they retain the same biological function through the path of evolution. In this paper, we describe different methods available for the detection of orthologs. Different computational methods comprising of phylogenetic as well as pair-wise comparison are discussed and compared. Some other methods based on synteny and protein network comparisons are also included in the paper. The study shows that phylogenetic methods of detecting orthologs are comparatively accurate and reliable than the pair-wise graph based methods but computationally more intensive and slow. These should be used only when sufficient computational power is available for operation. On the other hand, pair-wise approaches are fast and can handle large amounts of data. Synteny based methods also form a good candidate for the detection of orthologs.

Keywords: orthologs; evolution; phylogenetic methods; comparative genomics; pair-wise methods; synteny.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCIBSB.2020.106860

International Journal of Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, 2020 Vol.2 No.1, pp.31 - 47

Accepted: 20 May 2017
Published online: 24 Apr 2020 *

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