What is OrthoMCL?

OrthoMCL is a genome-scale algorithm for grouping orthologous protein sequences. It provides not only groups shared by two or more species/genomes, but also groups representing species-specific gene expansion families. So it serves as an important utility for automated eukaryotic genome annotation.

How does OrthoMCL work?

OrthoMCL is a genome-scale algorithm for grouping orthologous protein sequences. OrthoMCL starts with reciprocal best hits within each genome as potential in-paralog/recent paralog pairs and reciprocal best hits across any two genomes as potential ortholog pairs. Related proteins are interlinked in a similarity graph.

How are Orthology groups identified?

Putative orthologous relationships are identified between pairs of genomes by reciprocal best similarity pairs. For each putative ortholog, probable “recent” paralogs are identified as sequences within the same genome that are (reciprocally) more similar to each other than either is to any sequence from another genome.

What are orthologous groups?

Abstract. Hierarchical orthologous groups are defined as sets of genes that have descended from a single common ancestor within a taxonomic range of interest. Identifying such groups is useful in a wide range of contexts, including inference of gene function, study of gene evolution dynamics and comparative genomics.

What is MCL clustering?

The Markov Cluster (MCL) Algorithm is an unsupervised cluster algorithm for graphs based on simulation of stochastic flow in graphs. A single parameter, the inflation option (-I), controls the granularity of the output clustering.

How do I install OrthoMCL?

Installing the OrthoMCL Pipeline can be accomplished by downloading the code with the following command and then following the steps below….Installing the OrthoMCL Pipeline

  1. Step 1: Perl Dependencies.
  2. Step 2: Other Dependencies.
  3. Step 3: Database Setup.
  4. Step 4: Testing.
  5. Step 5: Running.

What is the study of Orthology?

Orthology is the study of the correct speaking or the right use of words in language. The word comes from Greek ortho- (“correct”) and -logy (“science of”). The most noted use of Orthology is for the selection of words for the language of Basic English by the Orthological Institute.

Why is Orthology important?

Furthermore, orthology is the most accurate way of describing differences and similarities in the composition of genomes from different species, because orthologues by definition trace back to an ancestral gene that was present in a common ancestor of the compared species.

Why are orthologous genes important?

Orthologs are defined as genes in different species that have evolved through speciation events only. Identification of orthologs accomplishes two goals: delineating the genealogy of genes to investigate the forces and mechanisms of evolutionary process, and creating groups of genes with the same biological functions.

How do you define orthologous genes?

Orthologous genes are homologous genes that diverged after evolution gives rise to different species, an event known as speciation. The genes generally maintain a similar function to that of the ancestral gene that they evolved from.

What is MCL algorithm?

Do you need OrthoMCL for protein annotations?

OrthoMCL is the leading piece of software for inferring orthologs across several organisms. In this tutorial I will provide detailed instructions for running a set of protein annotations through OrthoMCL. OrthoMCL, and it’s dependencies, must be installed. Detailed information on this tool and its installation can be found here.

How is an orthogroup used in comparative genomics?

Here an orthogroup by definition contains both orthologues and paralogues, and in this context is frequently used as a unit of comparison for comparative genomics [ 10 – 12 ]. In this work we follow this latter approach as it is a logical extension of orthology to multiple species.

Which is the best method to identify complete orthogroups?

The second group of methods do not adopt this pairwise strategy but rather attempt to identify complete orthogroups; an orthogroup is the set of genes that are descended from a single gene in the last common ancestor of all the species being considered [ 2, 5 – 9 ].

Where does OrthoMCL run on a FASTA file?

OrthoMCL will run on all FASTA files in a specified directory, so let’s write our processed protein FASTAs to a new directory called processed with the extension .fasta (required by OrthoMCL ). Note: The annotation data file (stored with a _protein_table.txt suffix) is obtained from NCBI.