QuartetS-DB: a large-scale orthology database for prokaryotes and eukaryotes inferred by evolutionary evidence.
BACKGROUND
The concept of orthology is key to decoding evolutionary relationships among genes across different species using comparative genomics. QuartetS is a recently reported algorithm for large-scale orthology detection. Based on the well-established evolutionary principle that gene duplication events discriminate paralogous from orthologous genes, QuartetS has been shown to improve orthology detection accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency.


METHODS
QuartetS-DB is a new orthology database constructed using the QuartetS algorithm. The database provides orthology predictions among 1621 complete genomes (1365 bacterial, 92 archaeal, and 164 eukaryotic), covering more than seven million proteins and four million pairwise orthologs. It is a major source of orthologous groups, containing more than 300,000 groups of orthologous proteins and 236,000 corresponding gene trees. The database also provides over 500,000 groups of inparalogs. In addition to its size, a distinguishing feature of QuartetS-DB is the ability to allow users to select a cutoff value that modulates the balance between prediction accuracy and coverage of the retrieved pairwise orthologs. The database is accessible at https://applications.bioanalysis.org/quartetsdb.


CONCLUSIONS
QuartetS-DB is one of the largest orthology resources available to date. Because its orthology predictions are underpinned by evolutionary evidence obtained from sequenced genomes, we expect its accuracy to continue to increase in future releases as the genomes of additional species are sequenced.
United States Department of Defense Biotechnology High Performance Computing Software Applications Institute, Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center, US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, Fort Detrick, MD 21702, USA.
Chenggang
C
Yu
Valmik
V
Desai
Li
L
Cheng
Jaques
J
Reifman
D000465:Algorithms; D001105:Archaea / Q000235:genetics; D001419:Bacteria / Q000235:genetics; D005075:Biological Evolution; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D056890:Eukaryota / Q000235:genetics; D020440:Gene Duplication; D023281:Genomics / Q000379:methods; D011506:Proteins / Q000235:genetics
D011506:Proteins