Seminar room RB35 (Roslagstullsbacken 35, the SBC house)
Description
As the genomic era has been ceaselessly advancing, more genomes have been completely sequenced and more diseases have been identified in the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man database (OMIM). To further the understanding of human disease and to develop new, effective medicines and therapies, there is a need for tools to extract biologically meaningful information if we are to keep pace with emerging diseases. Many genes in other organisms share function with human genes, particularly if they are orthologs, that is, if they are descended from the same genes in the last common ancestral species. Orthology is an indispensable key for transferring biological knowledge between species, from protein annotations to sophisticated disease models, especially for human diseases. However, orthology assignment is not trivial. The quality of ortholog clusters is hence essential for the appropriate selection of model organisms when designing drugs and for predicting human responses to treatments. We therefore present an updated version of OrthoDisease, a disease gene orthologs database. OrthoDisease offers a more complete evolutionary picture of disease genetics, allowing researchers to analyse orthologs to new disease genes, and to select suitable model systems for particular diseases. OrthoDisease provides disease ortholog clusters between Homo sapiens and 99 other organisms and offers four search features: 1. Disease search, 2. Gene search, 3. OMIM search, and 4. Text search. In addition, each search feature allows users to restrict the search to a species of interest. The database is accessible online at http://orthodisease.sbc.su.se.