Orthology clusters from gene trees with possvm

Abstract

Possvm (Phylogenetic Ortholog Sorting with Species oVerlap and MCL [Markov clustering algorithm]) is a tool that automates the process of identifying clusters of orthologous genes from precomputed phylogenetic trees and classifying gene families. It identifies orthology relationships between genes using the species overlap algorithm to infer taxonomic information from the gene tree topology, and then uses the MCL to identify orthology clusters and provide annotated gene families. Our benchmarking shows that this approach, when provided with accurate phylogenies, is able to identify manually curated orthogroups with very high precision and recall. Overall, Possvm automates the routine process of gene tree inspection and annotation in a highly interpretable manner, and provides reusable outputs and phylogeny-aware gene annotations that can be used to inform comparative genomics and gene family evolution analyses.