Database

FlyPhy: a phylogenomic analysis platform for Drosophila genes and gene families

Jinyu Wu^1* , Xiang Xu^2* , Jian Xiao² , Long Xu² , Huiguang Yi¹ , Shengjie Gao¹ , Jing Liu¹ , Qiyu Bao¹ , Fangqing Zhao³ and Xiaokun Li²

¹  Institute of Biomedical Informatics/Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Medical Genetics, Wenzhou Medical College, Wenzhou 325000, PR China

²  School of Pharmaceutical Science/Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Biotechnology Pharmaceutical Engineering, Wenzhou Medical College, Wenzhou 325035, PR China

³  Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania 16802, USA

author email corresponding author email* Contributed equally

BMC Bioinformatics 2009, 10:123doi:10.1186/1471-2105-10-123

Published:	25 April 2009

Abstract

Background

The availability of 12 fully sequenced Drosophila species genomes provides an excellent opportunity to explore the evolutionary mechanism, structure and function of gene families in Drosophila. Currently, several important resources, such as FlyBase, FlyMine and DroSpeGe, have been devoted to integrating genetic, genomic, and functional data of Drosophila into a well-organized form. However, all of these resources are gene-centric and lack the information of the gene families in Drosophila.

Description

FlyPhy is a comprehensive phylogenomic analysis platform devoted to analyzing the genes and gene families in Drosophila. Genes were classified into families using a graph-based Markov Clustering algorithm and extensively annotated by a number of bioinformatic tools, such as basic sequence features, functional category, gene ontology terms, domain organization and sequence homolog to other databases. FlyPhy provides a simple and user-friendly web interface to allow users to browse and retrieve the information at multiple levels. An outstanding feature of the FlyPhy is that all the retrieved results can be added to a workset for further data manipulation. For the data stored in the workset, multiple sequence alignment, phylogenetic tree construction and visualization can be easily performed to investigate the sequence variation of each given family and to explore its evolutionary mechanism.

Conclusion

With the above functionalities, FlyPhy will be a useful resource and convenient platform for the Drosophila research community. The FlyPhy is available at http://bioinformatics.zj.cn/fly/ webcite.