Plant, Animal & Microbe Genomes X Conference Plant, Animal & Microbe Genomes X ConferenceJanuary 12-16, 2002
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA
Workshop: Bioinformatics/Computers
Comparative genomics promises to rapidly accelerate the identification and functional classification of important human genes. Based on TIGR Gene Indices, we developed the TIGR Orthologous Gene Alignment (TOGA; http://www.tigr.org/tdb/toga/toga.shtml) program to provide a cross-reference between the eukaryotic genomes. Starting with the assembled EST and gene sequences that comprise the 46 TIGR Gene Indices representing the biological and economically important species for animal, plant, protist and fungi, we used high-stringency pair-wise sequence searches and a reflexive, transitive closure process to associate sequence-specific best hits, generating 32,382 Tentative Orthologue Groups (TOGs). This has allowed us to identify putative orthologues and paralogues for known genes as well as those that exist only as uncharacterized ESTs and to provide links to additional information including genome sequence and mapping data. A specific report, including the sequence accession and annotation, the similarity between each sequence in the group and the multiple sequence alignment, has been generated for each group. TOGA provides an important new resource for the analysis of gene function in eukaryotes. In addition, an analysis of the most widely represented sequences can begin to provide insight into the core processes for the eukaryotic organisms. And the evolutionary distance between these eukaryotic species was estimated based on the overall representation of the sequences from each species. The homologs of the known human disease genes were also detected and analyzed through TOGA.