Many of you have written to us in the past and pointed out some spurious human orthology calls for elegans genes, most of these have been noticed in the gene descriptions that appear in the Overview widget on the gene page. WormBase now uses the DIOPT orthology data from the Alliance of Genome Resources and has increased stringency by displaying only those human orthologs that have been determined by three or more methods. This should significantly improve the orthology data in WormBase which is reflected in the gene descriptions. Note that this change will go live in the WS276 version of WormBase coming soon (late April, 2020).
Paper of Interest: OrthoList 2
The new comparative genomic analysis between C. elegans and humans, OrthoList 2 (OL2), was just published early online in GENETICS. OL2 comes with a new web-based tool that allows for rapid searches of OL2 by worm or human gene identifiers, protein domains (InterPro and SMART), or human-disease associations (OMIM), and also includes updated RNAi resources. The paper describes OL2 and various findings, including how the content of OL2 compares with the original OrthoList tool. The web-based tool for accessing OL2 is here.