A daily-updated tree of (sequenced) life as a reference for genome research.

We report a daily-updated sequenced/species Tree Of Life (sTOL) as a reference for the increasing number of cellular organisms with their genomes sequenced. The sTOL builds on a likelihood-based weight calibration algorithm to consolidate NCBI taxonomy information in concert with unbiased sampling of molecular characters from whole genomes of all sequenced organisms. Via quantifying the extent of agreement between taxonomic and molecular data, we observe there are many potential improvements that can be made to the status quo classification, particularly in the Fungi kingdom; we also see that the current state of many animal genomes is rather poor. To augment the use of sTOL in providing evolutionary contexts, we integrate an ontology infrastructure and demonstrate its utility for evolutionary understanding on: nuclear receptors, stem cells and eukaryotic genomes. The sTOL (http://supfam.org/SUPERFAMILY/sTOL) provides a binary tree of (sequenced) life, and contributes to an analytical platform linking genome evolution, function and phenotype.

Evolutionarily consistent families in SCOP: sequence, structure and function.

BACKGROUND: SCOP is a hierarchical domain classification system for proteins of known structure. The superfamily level has a clear definition: Protein domains belong to the same superfamily if there is structural, functional and sequence evidence for a common evolutionary ancestor. Superfamilies are sub-classified into families, however, there is not such a clear basis for the family level groupings. Do SCOP families group together domains with sequence similarity, do they group domains with similar structure or by common function? It is these questions we answer, but most importantly, whether each family represents a distinct phylogenetic group within a superfamily. RESULTS: Several phylogenetic trees were generated for each superfamily: one derived from a multiple sequence alignment, one based on structural distances, and the final two from presence/absence of GO terms or EC numbers assigned to domains. The topologies of the resulting trees and confidence values were compared to the SCOP family classification. CONCLUSIONS: We show that SCOP family groupings are evolutionarily consistent to a very high degree with respect to classical sequence phylogenetics. The trees built from (automatically generated) structural distances correlate well, but are not always consistent with SCOP (hand annotated) groupings. Trees derived from functional data are less consistent with the family level than those from structure or sequence, though the majority still agree. Much of GO and EC annotation applies directly to one family or subset of the family; relatively few terms apply at the superfamily level. Maximum sequence diversity within a family is on average 22% but close to zero for superfamilies.

SUPERFAMILY 1.75 including a domain-centric gene ontology method.

The SUPERFAMILY resource provides protein domain assignments at the structural classification of protein (SCOP) superfamily level for over 1400 completely sequenced genomes, over 120 metagenomes and other gene collections such as UniProt. All models and assignments are available to browse and download at http://supfam.org. A new hidden Markov model library based on SCOP 1.75 has been created and a previously ignored class of SCOP, coiled coils, is now included. Our scoring component now uses HMMER3, which is in orders of magnitude faster and produces superior results. A cloud-based pipeline was implemented and is publicly available at Amazon web services elastic computer cloud. The SUPERFAMILY reference tree of life has been improved allowing the user to highlight a chosen superfamily, family or domain architecture on the tree of life. The most significant advance in SUPERFAMILY is that now it contains a domain-based gene ontology (GO) at the superfamily and family levels. A new methodology was developed to ensure a high quality GO annotation. The new methodology is general purpose and has been used to produce domain-based phenotypic ontologies in addition to GO.

TreeVector: scalable, interactive, phylogenetic trees for the web.

BACKGROUND: Phylogenetic trees are complex data forms that need to be graphically displayed to be human-readable. Traditional techniques of plotting phylogenetic trees focus on rendering a single static image, but increases in the production of biological data and large-scale analyses demand scalable, browsable, and interactive trees. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We introduce TreeVector, a Scalable Vector Graphics-and Java-based method that allows trees to be integrated and viewed seamlessly in standard web browsers with no extra software required, and can be modified and linked using standard web technologies. There are now many bioinformatics servers and databases with a range of dynamic processes and updates to cope with the increasing volume of data. TreeVector is designed as a framework to integrate with these processes and produce user-customized phylogenies automatically. We also address the strengths of phylogenetic trees as part of a linked-in browsing process rather than an end graphic for print. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: TreeVector is fast and easy to use and is available to download precompiled, but is also open source. It can also be run from the web server listed below or the user's own web server. It has already been deployed on two recognized and widely used database Web sites.

SUPERFAMILY--sophisticated comparative genomics, data mining, visualization and phylogeny.

SUPERFAMILY provides structural, functional and evolutionary information for proteins from all completely sequenced genomes, and large sequence collections such as UniProt. Protein domain assignments for over 900 genomes are included in the database, which can be accessed at http://supfam.org/. Hidden Markov models based on Structural Classification of Proteins (SCOP) domain definitions at the superfamily level are used to provide structural annotation. We recently produced a new model library based on SCOP 1.73. Family level assignments are also available. From the web site users can submit sequences for SCOP domain classification; search for keywords such as superfamilies, families, organism names, models and sequence identifiers; find over- and underrepresented families or superfamilies within a genome relative to other genomes or groups of genomes; compare domain architectures across selections of genomes and finally build multiple sequence alignments between Protein Data Bank (PDB), genomic and custom sequences. Recent extensions to the database include InterPro abstracts and Gene Ontology terms for superfamiles, taxonomic visualization of the distribution of families across the tree of life, searches for functionally similar domain architectures and phylogenetic trees. The database, models and associated scripts are available for download from the ftp site.