NORTH: a highly accurate and scalable Naive Bayes based ORTHologous gene clustering algorithm

Abstract Background The principal objective of comparative genomics is inferring attributes of an unknown gene by comparing it with well-studied genes. In this regard, identifying orthologous genes plays a pivotal role as the orthologous genes remain less diverged in the course of evolution. However, identifying orthologous genes is often difficult, slow, and idiosyncratic, especially in the presence of multiplicity of domains in proteins, evolutionary dynamics (gene duplication, transfer, loss, introgression etc.), multiple paralogous genes, incomplete genome data, and for distantly related species where similarity is hard to recognize. Motivation Advances in identifying orthologs have mostly been constrained to developing databases of genes or methods which involve computationally expensive BLAST search or constructing phylogenetic trees to infer orthologous relationships. These methods…