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Studying genes helps life science researchers understand how ourbodies work and how diseases progress. Scientists have long lookedto model species -- mice, for example -- to understand humanbiology. This is at the root of what is called the 'orthologconjecture': the idea that we can take what we learn from a fewspecies and apply it to many. The ortholog conjecture To get an idea of what orthologs are about, consider wolf teeth. Ifwe want to know more about our canine teeth, would we learn more bylooking at the canines of wolves? Or would it be better to look atour molars? The answer might not be straightforward. In genetics,scientists address a similar question: Is it better to comparegenes in mice and humans that directly descend from a commonancestor (these are called 'orthologs') -- or to compare imperfectcopies of genes within a human being (the 'paralogs')? Assume nothing For the past 40 years, scientists have gone with Plan A: theorthologs, and this has worked quite well. Studying genes in modelspecies has provided invaluable insights in all areas of biology.But until now, there hasn't been enough data to answer thisquestion with authority. With advances in biotechnology producingvast quantities of data every day, there is finally enough tosettle the debate. Using advanced computational techniques on data derived from tensof thousands of scientific articles, the researchers analysed 400000 pairs of genes (orthologs and paralogs) from 13 differentspecies. The team compared the two approaches and picked a winner. "We have the data to prove that the study of orthologs isindeed useful, but we are only at the beginning," says Prof.Marc Robinson-Rechavi of SIB and the University of Lausanne."This is at the heart of all of comparative genomics, in whichwe try to extrapolate knowledge from a handful of organisms andapply it to all of life." "We found that current experimental annotations do support thestandard model," explains Christophe Dessimoz of EMBL-EBI."Our work corroborates the assumption that studying the genesof other species -- whether mice, yeast, or even bacteria -- canelucidate aspects of human biology." The same question has recently been addressed by Matthew Hahn andcolleagues (University of Indiana, USA), whose different conclusionsparked some debate. The new research demonstrates that thesecontroversial results were due to overlooked biases in thecollective knowledge of gene function. Controlling for these, thenew study unequivocally supports the ortholog conjecture and thefact that studying species we are only distantly related to -- evenworms, flies, yeasts or bacteria -- is relevant and useful. This study was made possible by the tradition of open science inbioinformatics, which is strongly supported by SIB, EMBL-EBI andELIXIR, the incipient infrastructure for life science data inEurope. All of the data used in the study was freely available,including the genome sequences and experimental knowledge describedin thousands of publications. ELIXIR will build on this traditionand provide the next generation of infrastructure for biologicalinformation in Europe and worldwide. The e-commerce company in China offers quality products such as China Annealed Steel Wire , Cutting Wire Rope, and more. For more , please visit Tyre Bead Wire today!
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