Gene trees and homologues, Demo

Demo: gene trees and homology predictions

Plants Compara

Gene trees

Let’s look at the homologues of Coffea canephora (coffee) GSCOC_T00022371001. Open Ensembl Plants, search for the gene and go to the Gene tab.

Click on Plant compara: Gene tree, which will display the current gene in the context of a phylogenetic tree used to determine orthologues and paralogues.

Funnels indicate collapsed nodes. We can expand them by clicking on the node and selecting Expand this sub-tree from the pop-up menu.

We can also see the protein alignment of the sub-tree by clicking on Wasabi viewer, which will open a pop-up:

You can download the tree in a variety of formats. Click on the download icon in the bar at the top of the image to get a pop-up where you can choose your format.

Homologues

We can look at homologues in the Orthologues and Paralogues pages, which can be accessed from the left-hand menu. If there are no orthologues or paralogues, then the name will be greyed out. Click on Plant compara: Orthologues to see the orthologues available in plants.

Choose to see only Eudicotyledons orthologues by selecting the box. The table below will now only show details of Eudicotyledons orthologues. Let’s look at Arabidopsis thaliana.

Here we can see there is a many-to-many relationship between the coffee and A. thaliana orthologues. Links from the orthologue allow you to go to alignments of the orthologous proteins and cDNAs. Click on View Sequence Alignments then View cDNA Alignment for the first A. thaliana orthologue.