SynBlast: Assisting the analysis of conserved synteny information

Motivation: In the last years more than 20 vertebrate genomes have been sequenced, and the rate at which genomic DNA information becomes available is rapidly accelerating. Gene duplication and gene loss events inherently limit the accuracy of orthology detection based on sequence similarity alone. Fully automated methods for orthology annotation do exist but often fail to identify individual members in cases of large gene families, or to distinguish missing data from traceable gene losses. This situation can be improved in many cases by including conserved synteny information. Results: Here we present the SynBlast pipeline that is designed to construct and evaluate local synteny information. SynBlast uses the genomic region around a focal reference gene to retrieve candidates for homologous regions from a collection of target genomes and ranks them in accord with the available evidence for homology. The pipeline is intended as a tool to aid high quality manual annotation in particular...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Jörg Lehmann, Peter F. Stadler, Sonja J. Prohaska
• Keywords: BMCBI 2008, Gene, Gene Loss Events, Traceable Gene Losses