Gene family assignment-free comparative genomics

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The comparison of relative gene orders between two genomes offers deep insights into functional correlations of genes and the evolutionary relationships between the corresponding organisms. Methods for gene order analyses often requi...

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Main Authors: Doerr Daniel, Thévenin Annelyse, Stoye Jens
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: BMC 2012-12-01
Series:BMC Bioinformatics
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author Doerr Daniel
Thévenin Annelyse
Stoye Jens
author_facet Doerr Daniel
Thévenin Annelyse
Stoye Jens
author_sort Doerr Daniel
collection DOAJ
description <p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The comparison of relative gene orders between two genomes offers deep insights into functional correlations of genes and the evolutionary relationships between the corresponding organisms. Methods for gene order analyses often require prior knowledge of homologies between all genes of the genomic dataset. Since such information is hard to obtain, it is common to predict homologous groups based on sequence similarity. These hypothetical groups of homologous genes are called <it>gene families</it>.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>This manuscript promotes a new branch of gene order studies in which prior assignment of gene families is not required. As a case study, we present a new similarity measure between pairs of genomes that is related to the breakpoint distance. We propose an exact and a heuristic algorithm for its computation. We evaluate our methods on a dataset comprising 12 γ-proteobacteria from the literature.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>In evaluating our algorithms, we show that the exact algorithm is suitable for computations on small genomes. Moreover, the results of our heuristic are close to those of the exact algorithm. In general, we demonstrate that gene order studies can be improved by direct, gene family assignment-free comparisons.</p>
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spelling doaj.art-a3cf617e2a2d4fedbfbc1eb189b70d522022-12-22T03:01:18ZengBMCBMC Bioinformatics1471-21052012-12-0113Suppl 19S310.1186/1471-2105-13-S19-S3Gene family assignment-free comparative genomicsDoerr DanielThévenin AnnelyseStoye Jens<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The comparison of relative gene orders between two genomes offers deep insights into functional correlations of genes and the evolutionary relationships between the corresponding organisms. Methods for gene order analyses often require prior knowledge of homologies between all genes of the genomic dataset. Since such information is hard to obtain, it is common to predict homologous groups based on sequence similarity. These hypothetical groups of homologous genes are called <it>gene families</it>.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>This manuscript promotes a new branch of gene order studies in which prior assignment of gene families is not required. As a case study, we present a new similarity measure between pairs of genomes that is related to the breakpoint distance. We propose an exact and a heuristic algorithm for its computation. We evaluate our methods on a dataset comprising 12 γ-proteobacteria from the literature.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>In evaluating our algorithms, we show that the exact algorithm is suitable for computations on small genomes. Moreover, the results of our heuristic are close to those of the exact algorithm. In general, we demonstrate that gene order studies can be improved by direct, gene family assignment-free comparisons.</p>
spellingShingle Doerr Daniel
Thévenin Annelyse
Stoye Jens
Gene family assignment-free comparative genomics
BMC Bioinformatics
title Gene family assignment-free comparative genomics
title_full Gene family assignment-free comparative genomics
title_fullStr Gene family assignment-free comparative genomics
title_full_unstemmed Gene family assignment-free comparative genomics
title_short Gene family assignment-free comparative genomics
title_sort gene family assignment free comparative genomics
work_keys_str_mv AT doerrdaniel genefamilyassignmentfreecomparativegenomics
AT theveninannelyse genefamilyassignmentfreecomparativegenomics
AT stoyejens genefamilyassignmentfreecomparativegenomics