1. From the Ensembl homepage, choose European seabass from the drop-down list and search for pax6b. Click through to the Gene tab view. Click on Comparative Genomics: Orthologues at the left side of the page to see all the orthologous genes.

   From the summary table, we can see that the European seabass has 52 1-to-1 orthologues and 9 1-to-many orthologues in the ray-finned fishes species list.

2. Search for Gilthead seabream in the orthologues table below.

   The percentage of identical amino acids in the Gilthead seabream protein (the orthologue) compared with the gene of interest, i.e. the European seabass pax6b (the target species/gene), is 99.78%. This is known as the Target%id.

The identity of the gene of interest (European seabass pax6b) when compared with the orthologue (Gilthead seabream pax6b, the query species/gene) is 99.78% (the Query %id).

Note that any difference in the values of the Target and Query %id reflects the different protein lengths for the two orthologues. In the case of the European seabass and Gilthead seabream, the identity is the same as both proteins are 457 amino acids long.

1. Click on the View Sequence Alignments link in the Orthologue column to View Protein Alignment in ClustalW format.

   Conserved amino acids are indicated by asteriks (*). You can find more information about the ClustalW format in our help pages. There is no difference between the N-terminus and C-terminus. The sequence is conserved around both termini.