What is "orthodb"

OrthoDB presents a catalog of orthologous protein-coding genes across vertebrates, arthropods, fungi, plants, and bacteria. Orthology refers to the last common ancestor of the species under consideration, and thus OrthoDB explicitly delineates orthologs at each major radiation along the species phylogeny. The database of orthologs presents available protein descriptors, together with Gene Ontology and InterPro attributes, which serve to provide general descriptive annotations of the orthologous groups, and facilitate comprehensive orthology database querying. OrthoDB also provides computed evolutionary traits of orthologs, such as gene duplicability and loss profiles, divergence rates, sibling groups, and gene intron-exon architectures.

In comparative genomics, the importance of scale cannot be underestimated. As gene orthology delineation requires specific expertise and considerable computational resources, scale is something that individual non-specialist research groups cannot accomplish on their own. This challenging task is achieved by OrthoDB, with very comprehensive sets of species and several unique features such as the extensive functional and evolutionary annotations of orthologous groups, with the integration of many useful links to other world-leading databases that focus on capturing information about gene function. No genome can exist as a useful data source without extensive comparative analyses with other genomes – OrthoDB provides a critically important resource for comparative genomics for the entire community of researchers from those interested in grand evolutionary questions to those focused on the specific biological functions of individual genes.