Find evolutionarily related genes across insects and other arthropods on our new Ortholog webpages

NCBI recently released a set of orthologs for approximately 2 million insect genes. You can now find and access the orthologous genes, transcripts, and proteins by searching a species and gene name in NCBI All Databases, NCBI Gene, or NCBI Datasets. As previously described, these orthologs are based on comparisons to the Drosophila melanogaster annotated genome. Using Drosophila gene nomenclature for orthologs should lead to more informative gene symbols for insects and other arthropods. 

Example: Getting insect orthologs for the Delta gene

Figure 1: Three ways to access orthologs for a gene: from the information box on an All Databases Search on the NCBI Homepage, from a Gene record page, and from the Datasets Gene service. 

Figure 2: The orthologs page for the Delta gene filtered for members from the insect suborder Apocrita (wasps, ants, and bees).   

Command-line access

Use NCBI Datasets command line (CLI) tool for programmatic access to orthologs. Download and install client. See our how-to-guide to get started.  

Currently accessing Orthologs through the NCBI FTP site?

All information is now integrated in the gene_orthologs.gz file.  

Learn more

For more information about NCBI Datasets and for step-by-step instructions on how to use it, see our help documentation.  

Stay up to date

NCBI Orthologs and NCBI Datasets are part of the NIH Comparative Genomics Resource (CGR). CGR facilitates reliable comparative genomics analyses for all eukaryotic organisms through an NCBI Toolkit and community collaboration.  

Follow us on social @NCBI and join our mailing list to keep up to date with NCBI Datasets and other CGR news. 

Questions?

If you have questions or would like to provide feedback, please reach out to us at [email protected].  

 

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