PBIL

HOMOLENS : Homologous Sequences in Ensembl Animal Genomes

HOMOLENS release 04 (June 2008)

Release informations: Protein Nucleotide

Previous release

HOMOLENS is a database of homologous genes from Ensembl organisms, structured under ACNUC sequence database management system. It allows to select sets of homologous genes among species, and to visualize multiple alignments and phylogenetic trees.It is as well possible to search for orthologous genes in a wide rane of taxons. Thus HOMOLENS is particularly useful for comparative sequence analysis, phylogeny and molecular evolution studies. More generaly, HOMOLENS gives an overall view of what is known about a peculiar gene family. Note that HOMOLENS is splitted into two databases on this server: HOMOLENS contains the protein sequences while HOMOLENSDNA contains the nucleotide sequences. Protein sequences of HOMOLENS have been generated by translating the CDS of HOMOLENSDNA and using associated cross-references to generate the annotations.

New (02/2008)! New tree viewer application: see here.

Query HOMOLENS using web applications

Acces to several ACNUC databases: EMBL,GenBank,SwissProt, HOVERGEN, HOGENOM, HOMOLENS, etc.

Query HOMOLENS proteins

You may enter any word ( sequence name, keyword, species, ...)
Search for protein sequences Search for protein families

exact
match

enter a word

exact
match

enter a word
Check the box if you want to report exact matches only.

Query HOMOLENS nucleotide sequences

You may enter any word ( sequence name, keyword, species, ...)
Search for CDS sequences Search for CDS families

exact
match

enter a word

exact
match

enter a word
Check the box if you want to report exact matches only.

Query HOMOLENS using BLAST

You may blast your sequence against several databases at PBIL.

Query HOMOLENS using HoSeqI

You may search the HOMOLENS family which is the closest of your sequence. Associated alignment and phylogenetic tree are automatically generated.
  • HoseqI Allows to retrieve protein family in HOMOLENS

Orthologs search

You can retrieve orthologous and paralogous genes with the FamFetch application. This is a powerful tool allowing you to request the phylogenic trees database with a complex tree user-build motif including duplication and speciation events. You can use as well a command-line version of FamFetch. Altenatively, precalculated othologous animal genes are available from the HOMOLENS database.

Acces to HOMOLENS

You can query the database on thispage or via several access :

Contents

Organisms

HOMOLENS is build from the Ensembl database:
  • Ensembl (Release 49) : Animals from the EBI :
    • Aedes aegypti
    • Anopheles gambiae
    • Apis mellifera
    • Bos taurus
    • Caenorhabditis elegans
    • Canis familiaris
    • Cavia porcellus
    • Ciona intestinalis
    • Ciona savignyi
    • Danio rerio
    • Dasypus novemcinctus
    • Drospohila melanogaster
    • Echinops telfairi
    • Equus caballus
    • Erinaceus europaeus
    • Felis catus
    • Gallus gallus
    • Gasterosteus aculeatus
    • Homo sapiens
    • Loxodonta africana
    • Macaca mulatta
    • Microcebus murinus
    • Monodelphis domestica
    • Mus musculus
    • Myotis lucifugus
    • Ochotona princeps
    • Ornithorhynchus anatinus
    • Oryctolagus cuniculus
    • Oryzias latipes
    • Otolemur garnettii
    • Pan troglodytes
    • Pongo pygmaeus
    • Rattus norvegicus
    • Saccharomyces cerevisiae
    • Sorex araneus
    • Spermophilus tridecemlineatus
    • Takifugu rubripes
    • Tetraodon nigroviridis
    • Tupaia belangeri
    • Xenopus tropicalis
Data are modified and re-annotated: sequences names are modified according the organism, taxonomy fields are modified when they are unconsistant or not accurate, then gene family , GC contents, internal introns, 3'UTR and 5'UTR informations are added to annotations.

Sequences, Families, Alignments, Phylogenetic trees

Number of proteins 672,064
Number of CDS 892,572
Number of genomic sequences 178,069
Number of families (at least 2 sequences) 23,155
Number of orphans 90,953 (13%)
Number of protein sequences associated to a family 579,620 (86%)

Alignments and Phylogenetic trees for 23, 137 families containing 2 to 2000 sequences have been calculated. Phylogenetic trees are calculated with the program PHYML (substitution model = JTT, estimated proportion of invariable sites, 4 categories, estimated gamma, initial tree with BIONJ, "NNI" and "SPR" topology exploration) on conserved blocks of the MUSCLE alignments selected with GBLOCKS.

Paralogy/Orthology Events Assignment Phylogenetic trees of each gene family are analysed using RapMasse to assign duplication or speciation event to each node by comparison with the species tree.

HOMOLENS is now available. You can make requests on the protein and the genome data via our web server or via the socket server.

Server mirroring

You don't need to install the server itself to have HOMOLENS running on your computer as the client is enough for that purpose. On the other hand you may want to set-up your own server in a way to speed up your database access and to propose that service to potential users in your geographic area.Installation instructions can be found at http://pbil.univ-lyon1.fr/databases/acnuc/localinstall.html

The whole database is available from our FTP server at URL: ftp://pbil.univ-lyon1.fr/pub/homolens/ Note that it is much more efficient to use a dedicated FTP client to download the database rather than an Internet Web browser.

Family Building

To build the families we perform a similarity search of all the proteins against each other with BLASTP2. For this purpose, we use the BLOSUM62 similarity matrix and a threshold of 10-4 for E-values. Low complexity sequences are filtered with SEG. Then, the results are processed this way:
  • For each pair of sequences, Homologous Segment Pairs (HSPs) that are not compatible with a global alignment are removed
  • Two sequences in a pair are included in the same family if:
    • The remaining HSPs cover at least 80% of the proteins length.
    • Their similarity is greater or equal to 50% (two amino-acids are considered similar if the BLOSUM62 similarity score is positive)
  • We use simple transitive links to build our families. If a pair of sequences named A + B and a pair of sequences B + C fulfill the conditions listed above, then A, B and C are integrated in the same family, this even if the pair A + C does not fulfill these conditions.

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Sequence Annotations

Family annotation

Protein sequences: we add for each entry a line in the CC field that gives the number of the family the sequence belongs to:
CC   -!- GENE_FAMILY: HBG017522.
Genome sequence: we add for each coding sequence a qualifier that gives the number of the family the gene belongs to:
FT                   /gene_family="HBG017522"

This number is incorporated in the keywords associated to the corresponding entry in the ACNUC database structure. Due to that fact it is possible to retrieve all the sequences associated to a family with this number when using the retrieval system Query or the on-line version WWW-Query.

GC content and intron information annotations

We include in the the genomic sequneces the GC content of each coding sequence:
FT                   /%(C+G)="CG<35%"
FT                   /note="C+G content in third codon positions = 31.4 % "
It is thus possible to select sequences according to its GC content.

We also include in genmoic sequences descriptions of non-coding regions:

  • INT_INT: internals introns (i.e. within CDS)
  • 5'INT: introns in 5'UTR
  • 3'INT: introns in 3'UTR
  • 5'NCR: 5' non-coding region
  • 3'NCR: 3' non-coding region
For example:
FT   3'ncr           2278..2368
These subsequences can be selected and extracted from the database in the same way as CDS, using WWW-Query (see Help).

Contact and reference

If you encounter some problems when installing or using HOMOLENS, please contact Laurent Duret or Simon Penel Also we welcome any comments or suggestions on the database and/or its interface.

Acknowledgements

Calculations have been done at the IN2P3 Computing Center.

Licence

HOMOLENS Database
Copyright 2005 CNRS
Authors: Laurent Duret,Manolo Gouy, Simon Penel, Guy Perriere

This database is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
A copy of the GNU General Public License is available at ftp://pbil.univ-lyon1.fr/pub/hogenom and http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

References

If you use families from HOMOLENS or HOGENOM, Please cite :
Penel S, Arigon AM, Dufayard JF, Sertier AS, Daubin V, Duret L, Gouy M and Perrière G (2009)
"Databases of homologous gene families for comparative genomics" BMC Bioinformatics, 10 (Suppl 6):S3