| 1. |
- Altenhoff, Adrian M., et al.
(författare)
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Standardized benchmarking in the quest for orthologs
- 2016
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Ingår i: Nature Methods. - 1548-7091 .- 1548-7105. ; 13:5, s. 425-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Achieving high accuracy in orthology inference is essential for many comparative, evolutionary and functional genomic analyses, yet the true evolutionary history of genes is generally unknown and orthologs are used for very different applications across phyla, requiring different precision-recall trade-offs. As a result, it is difficult to assess the performance of orthology inference methods. Here, we present a community effort to establish standards and an automated web-based service to facilitate orthology benchmarking. Using this service, we characterize 15 well-established inference methods and resources on a battery of 20 different benchmarks. Standardized benchmarking provides a way for users to identify the most effective methods for the problem at hand, sets a minimum requirement for new tools and resources, and guides the development of more accurate orthology inference methods.
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| 2. |
- Duchemin, Wandrille, et al.
(författare)
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RecPhyloXML : a format for reconciled gene trees
- 2018
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Ingår i: Bioinformatics. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 1367-4803 .- 1367-4811. ; 34:21, s. 3646-3652
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Motivation: A reconciliation is an annotation of the nodes of a gene tree with evolutionary events-for example, speciation, gene duplication, transfer, loss, etc. -along with a mapping onto a species tree. Many algorithms and software produce or use reconciliations but often using different reconciliation formats, regarding the type of events considered or whether the species tree is dated or not. This complicates the comparison and communication between different programs. Results: Here, we gather a consortium of software developers in gene tree species tree reconciliation to propose and endorse a format that aims to promote an integrative-albeit flexible-specification of phylogenetic reconciliations. This format, named recPhyloXML, is accompanied by several tools such as a reconciled tree visualizer and conversion utilities.
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| 3. |
- Forslund, Kristoffer, et al.
(författare)
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Gearing up to handle the mosaic nature of life in the quest for orthologs
- 2018
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Ingår i: Bioinformatics. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 1367-4803 .- 1367-4811. ; 34:2, s. 323-329
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Quest for Orthologs (QfO) is an open collaboration framework for experts in comparative phylogenomics and related research areas who have an interest in highly accurate orthology predictions and their applications. We here report highlights and discussion points from the QfO meeting 2015 held in Barcelona. Achievements in recent years have established a basis to support developments for improved orthology prediction and to explore new approaches. Central to the QfO effort is proper benchmarking of methods and services, as well as design of standardized datasets and standardized formats to allow sharing and comparison of results. Simultaneously, analysis pipelines have been improved, evaluated and adapted to handle large datasets. All this would not have occurred without the long-term collaboration of Consortium members. Meeting regularly to review and coordinate complementary activities from a broad spectrum of innovative researchers clearly benefits the community. Highlights of the meeting include addressing sources of and legitimacy of disagreements between orthology calls, the context dependency of orthology definitions, special challenges encountered when analyzing very anciently rooted orthologies, orthology in the light of whole-genome duplications, and the concept of orthologous versus paralogous relationships at different levels, including domain-level orthology. Furthermore, particular needs for different applications (e.g. plant genomics, ancient gene families and others) and the infrastructure for making orthology inferences available (e.g. interfaces with model organism databases) were discussed, with several ongoing efforts that are expected to be reported on during the upcoming 2017 QfO meeting.
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| 4. |
- Glover, Natasha, et al.
(författare)
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Advances and Applications in the Quest for Orthologs
- 2019
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Ingår i: Molecular biology and evolution. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0737-4038 .- 1537-1719. ; 36:10, s. 2157-2164
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Gene families evolve by the processes of speciation (creating orthologs), gene duplication (paralogs), and horizontal gene transfer (xenologs), in addition to sequence divergence and gene loss. Orthologs in particular play an essential role in comparative genomics and phylogenomic analyses. With the continued sequencing of organisms across the tree of life, the data are available to reconstruct the unique evolutionary histories of tens of thousands of gene families. Accurate reconstruction of these histories, however, is a challenging computational problem, and the focus of the Quest for Orthologs Consortium. We review the recent advances and outstanding challenges in this field, as revealed at a symposium and meeting held at the University of Southern California in 2017. Key advances have been made both at the level of orthology algorithm development and with respect to coordination across the community of algorithm developers and orthology end-users. Applications spanned a broad range, including gene function prediction, phylostratigraphy, genome evolution, and phylogenomics. The meetings highlighted the increasing use of meta-analyses integrating results from multiple different algorithms, and discussed ongoing challenges in orthology inference as well as the next steps toward improvement and integration of orthology resources.
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| 5. |
- Khan, Mehmood Alam
(författare)
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Computational Problems in Modeling Evolution and Inferring Gene Families.
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Over the last few decades, phylogenetics has emerged as a very promising field, facilitating a comparative framework to explain the genetic relationships among all the living organisms on earth. These genetic relationships are typically represented by a bifurcating phylogenetic tree — the tree of life. Reconstructing a phylogenetic tree is one of the central tasks in evolutionary biology. The different evolutionary processes, such as gene duplications, gene losses, speciation, and lateral gene transfer events, make the phylogeny reconstruction task more difficult. However, with the rapid developments in sequencing technologies and availability of genome-scale sequencing data, give us the opportunity to understand these evolutionary processes in a more informed manner, and ultimately, enable us to reconstruct genes and species phylogenies more accurately. This thesis is an attempt to provide computational methods for phylogenetic inference and give tools to conduct genome-scale comparative evolutionary studies, such as detecting homologous sequences and inferring gene families.In the first project, we present FastPhylo as a software package containing fast tools for reconstructing distance-based phylogenies. It implements the previously published efficient algorithms for estimating a distance matrix from the input sequences and reconstructing an un-rooted Neighbour Joining tree from a given distance matrix. Results on simulated datasets reveal that FastPhylo can handles hundred of thousands of sequences in a minimum time and memory efficient manner. The easy to use, well-defined interfaces, and the modular structure of FastPhylo allows it to be used in very large Bioinformatic pipelines.In the second project, we present a synteny-aware gene homology method, called GenFamClust (GFC) that uses gene content and gene order conservation to detect homology. Results on simulated and biological datasets suggest that local synteny information combined with the sequence similarity improves the detection of homologs.In the third project, we introduce a novel phylogeny-based clustering method, PhyloGenClust, which partitions a very large gene family into smaller subfamilies. ROC (receiver operating characteristics) analysis on synthetic datasets show that PhyloGenClust identify subfamilies more accurately. PhyloGenClust can be used as a middle tier clustering method between raw clustering methods, such as sequence similarity methods, and more sophisticated Bayesian-based phylogeny methods.Finally, we introduce a novel probabilistic Bayesian method based on the DLTRS model, to sample reconciliations of a gene tree inside a species tree. The method uses MCMC framework to integrate LGTs, gene duplications, gene losses and sequence evolution under a relaxed molecular clock for substitution rates. The proposed sampling method estimates the posterior distribution of gene trees and provides the temporal information of LGT events over the lineages of a species tree. Analysis on simulated datasets reveal that our method performs well in identifying the true temporal estimates of LGT events. We applied our method to the genome-wide gene families for mollicutes and cyanobacteria, which gave an interesting insight into the potential LGTs highways.
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| 6. |
- Philippe, Herve, et al.
(författare)
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Mitigating Anticipated Effects of Systematic Errors Supports Sister-Group Relationship between Xenacoelomorpha and Ambulacraria
- 2019
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Ingår i: Current Biology. - : Elsevier BV. - 0960-9822 .- 1879-0445. ; 29:11, s. 1818-1826.e6
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Xenoturbella and the acoelomorph worms (Xenacoe-lomorpha) are simple marine animals with controversial affinities. They have been placed as the sister group of all other bilaterian animals (Nephrozoa hypothesis), implying their simplicity is an ancient characteristic [1, 2]; alternatively, they have been linked to the complex Ambulacraria (echinoderms and hemichordates) in a Glade called the Xenambulacraria [3,5], suggesting their simplicity evolved by reduction from a complex ancestor. The difficulty resolving this problem implies the phylogenetic signal supporting the correct solution is weak and affected by inadequate modeling, creating a misleading non-phylogenetic signal. The idea that the Nephrozoa hypothesis might be an artifact is prompted by the faster molecular evolutionary rate observed within the Acoelomorpha. Unequal rates of evolution are known to result in the systematic artifact of long branch attraction, which would be predicted to result in an attraction between long-branch acoelomorphs and the outgroup, pulling them toward the root [6]. Other biases inadequately accommodated by the models used can also have strong effects, exacerbated in the context of short internal branches and long terminal branches [7]. We have assembled a large and informative dataset to address this problem. Analyses designed to reduce or to emphasize misleading signals show the Nephrozoa hypothesis is supported under conditions expected to exacerbate errors, and the Xenambulacraria hypothesis is preferred in conditions designed to reduce errors. Our reanalyses of two other recently published datasets [1, 2] produce the same result. We conclude that the Xenacoelomorpha are simplified relatives of the Ambulacraria.
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