6533b871fe1ef96bd12d25e6

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Automated selection of homologs to track the evolutionary history of proteins

subject

description

Background The selection of distant homologs of a query protein under study is a usual and useful application of protein sequence databases. Such sets of homologs are often applied to investigate the function of a protein and the degree to which experimental results can be transferred from one organism to another. In particular, a variety of databases facilitates static browsing for orthologs. However, these resources have a limited power when identifying orthologs between taxonomically distant species. In addition, in some situations, for a given query protein, it is advantageous to compare the sets of orthologs from different specific organisms: this recursive step-wise search might give an idea of the evolutionary path of the protein as a series of consecutive steps, for example gaining or losing domains. However, a step-wise orthology search is a time-consuming task if the number of steps is high. Results To illustrate a solution for this problem, we present the web tool ProteinPathTracker, which allows to track the evolutionary history of a query protein by locating homologs in selected proteomes along several evolutionary paths. Additional functionalities include locking a region of interest to follow its evolution in the discovered homologous sequences and the study of the protein function evolution by analysis of the annotations of the homologs. Conclusions ProteinPathTracker is an easy-to-use web tool that automatises the practice of looking for selected homologs in distant species in a straightforward way for non-expert users. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12859-018-2457-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.