GNAS2009 Abstract #15 - Villela, Albert

EnsemblCompara GeneTrees: gene orthologs and paralogs in Ensembl

The EnsemblCompara GeneTrees is a computational pipeline to handle clustering, multiple alignment and tree generation of gene families. It provides a phylogenetic view of gene family evolution, which is the basis for the orthology and paralogy prediction of protein coding genes in Ensembl. Although the current methodologies are most of the time able to produce reliable automatic trees, even for highly heterogeneous genome sets, there are still challenges to overcome. Gene prediction errors, alignment quality and data scalability are some of the current issues in the field of homology prediction that need careful attention.