Orthodb: Genomics Data in the Light of Evolution

The OrthoDB [Kriventseva, et al. 2015] hierarchical catalog of orthologs (www.orthodb.org) is a comprehensive resource of comparative genomics data to help researchers make the most of their newly-sequenced genomes. Derived from OrthoDB, the sets of Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs, BUSCO [Simão, et al. 2015], are a rich source of data for assessing the quality and completeness of genome assemblies and annotations. These resources and tools facilitate an extensive orthology-based genome annotation and interpretation using a comparative genomics framework that incorporates the rapidly growing number of sequenced genomes. Orthology delineation is an integral part of comparative genomics, offering evolutionarily-consistent hypothesis on gene function through the identification of “equivalent” genes between different species, as well as identifying shared and unique genes providing an avenue for the investigation of key biological traits and to understand species diversity. These analyses rely on comprehensive and accurate input data for their success, making BUSCO quality assessment an important part of the process of genome sequencing, assembly, and annotation. Therefore, orthology-based approaches provide an important perspective to interpreting the ever-rising quantities of genomics data, and OrthoDB offers the ability to run custom analyses and to query extremely comprehensive sets of orthology classifications.