SwissOrthology – Your one-stop shop for orthologs

Tracing the evolutionary history of a protein, identifying which species (mouse, ferret, rat) could best serve as a model organism to study specific human pathologies, predicting protein functions in order to annotate a newly sequence rare species’ genome… Orthology inference is the cornerstone of countless biological questions.

And for a good reason: if two genes in two different species are deemed ‘orthologous’ (i.e. they have evolved from the same gene in their last common ancestor), often than not, they have the same function. A property that can be preserved over billions of years of evolution!

Many tools and methods exist to assist scientist in their search for orthologs, including the two leading SIB Resources OMA, developed by the Group of Christophe Dessimoz (University of Lausanne) and OrthoDB, developed by the Group of Evgeny Zdobnov (University of Geneva), which both provide precomputed gene orthology and standalone software for custom orthology analyses.

These were recently brought together under a single umbrella called SwissOrthology, which also includes quality assessment tools – BUSCO and the Orthology Benchmarking service. The SwissOrthology platform allows users to query both OMA and OrthoDB simultaneously, and an interactive guide helps users to decide which tool is best suited for their particular analysis.

In this in silico talk, SIB’s Natasha Glover, Postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Christophe Dessimoz (University of Lausanne) briefly takes you back to the basics of what orthologs are, before presenting SwissOrthology and using it in the concrete example of a molecular biologist trying to reconstruct the evolutionary history of a species...