SynFind: Compiling Syntenic Regions across Any Set of Genomes on Demand

Authors

Haibao Tang, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University
Matthew D. Bomhoff, University of Arizona
Evan Briones, University of Arizona
Liangsheng Zhang, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University
James C. Schnable, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Eric Lyons, University of ArizonaFollow

ORCID IDs

James C. Schnable

Date of this Version

11-11-2015

Citation

Genome Biology and Evolution (2015) 7(12): 3,286–3,298. DOI: 10.1093/gbe/evv219. SynFind can be accessed at http://genomevolution.org/CoGe/SynFind.pl. A video tutorial of SynFind using Phytophthrora as an example is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Agczny9Nyc.

Comments

Copyright 2015, the authors. Open access, Creative Commons Attribution license.

Abstract

The identification of conserved syntenic regions enables discovery of predicted locations for orthologous and homeologous genes, evenwhennosuchgeneispresent.Thiscapabilitymeansthatsynteny-basedmethodsarefarmoreeffectivethansequencesimilaritybased methods in identifying true-negatives, a necessity forstudying gene loss and gene transposition. However, the identification of syntenicregionsrequirescomplexanalyseswhichmustberepeatedforpairwisecomparisonsbetweenanytwospecies.Therefore,as the number of published genomes increases, there is a growing demand for scalable, simple-to-use applications to perform comparative genomic analyses that cater to both gene family studies and genome-scale studies. We implemented SynFind, a web-based tool that addresses this need. Given one query genome, SynFind is capable of identifying conserved syntenic regions in any set of targetgenomes.SynFindiscapableofreportingper-geneinformation,usefulforresearchersstudyingspecificgenefamilies,aswellas genome-wide data sets of syntenic gene and predicted gene locations, critical for researchers focused on large-scale genomic analyses. Inference of syntenic homologs provides the basis for correlation of functional changes around genes of interests between related organisms. Deployed on the CoGe online platform, SynFind is connected to the genomic data from over 15,000 organisms from all domains of life as well as supporting multiple releases of the same organism. SynFind makes use of a powerful job execution framework that promises scalability and reproducibility. SynFind can be accessed at http://genomevolution.org/CoGe/SynFind.pl. A video tutorial of SynFind using Phytophthrora as an example is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Agczny9Nyc.