OrthoDB in 2020: evolutionary and functional annotations of orthologs

OrthoDB provides evolutionary and functional annotations of orthologs, inferred for a vast number of available organisms. OrthoDB is leading in the coverage and genomic diversity sampling of Eukaryotes, Prokaryotes and Viruses, and the sampling of Bacteria is further set to increase three-fold. The user interface has been enhanced in response to the massive growth in data. OrthoDB provides three views on the data: (i) a list of orthologous groups related to a user query, which are now arranged to visualize their hierarchical relations, (ii) a detailed view of an orthologous group, now featuring a Sankey diagram to facilitate navigation between the levels of orthology, from more finely-resolved to more general groups of orthologs, as well as an arrangement of orthologs into an interactive organism taxonomy structure, and (iii) we added a gene-centric view, showing the gene functional annotations and the pair-wise orthologs in example species. The OrthoDB standalone software for delineation of orthologs, Orthologer, is freely available. Online BUSCO assessments and mapping to OrthoDB of user-uploaded data enable interactive exploration of related annotations and generation of comparative charts. OrthoDB strives to predict orthologs from the broadest coverage of species, as well as to extensively collate available functional annotations, and to compute evolutionary annotations such as evolutionary rate and phyletic profile. OrthoDB data can be assessed via SPARQL RDF, REST API, downloaded or browsed online from https://orthodb.org.

Automated summary

OrthoDB provides evolutionary and functional annotations of orthologs for a vast number of organisms, with a wide coverage of species and rich data content. The user interface has been enhanced, and features three views on the data, as well as online tools for interactive exploration and data download.