OrthoBrowser: gene family analysis and visualization
Nolan T Hartwick1, Todd P Michael1
1The Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Laboratory, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA 92037, United States.
Motivation:
The analysis of gene families across diverse species is pivotal in elucidating evolutionary dynamics and functional genomic landscapes. Typical analysis approaches often require significant computational expertise and user time.
Results:
We introduce OrthoBrowser, a static site generator that will index and serve phylogeny, gene trees, multiple sequence alignments, and novel multiple synteny alignments. This greatly enhances the usability of tools like OrthoFinder by making the detailed results much more visually accessible. This interface can scale reasonably up to hundreds of genomes, allows a user to filter this large dataset to a subset of samples they are interested in at that particular moment in time, or "zoom in" to only a subtree of the orthogroup. The multiple synteny alignment method uses a progressive hierarchical alignment approach in the protein space using orthogroup membership to establish orthology. Orthobrowser makes it easy for users to identify, interact with, explore, and share key information about their gene families of interest.
Availability And Implementation:
OrthoBrowser is pip installable and is available under MIT license at: https://gitlab.com/salk-tm/orthobrowser. Complete example OrthoBrowser results are available at: https://orthobrowserexamples.netlify.app/.
Related Concept Videos
Gene Families
Occasionally these regions can be adapted to take on new roles within the organism, becoming novel genes...
Evolutionary Relationships through Genome Comparisons
Gene Evolution - Fast or Slow?
In contrast, regions which code...
Pedigree Analysis
Genetic Screens
Forward genetic screens
Forward or “classical” genetic screens involve creating random mutations in an organism’s DNA using radiation, mutagens, or insertion of additional bases, which...
Gene Duplication and Divergence
The duplicated copies of the gene are called Paralogs. Paralogs with similar sequences and functions form a gene family. Across several species, a large number of gene families are...


