250K+ new Hymenoptera orthologs added
NCBI is excited to announce the expansion of ortholog data for RefSeq arthropods. This update expands the breadth of arthropod orthology information, offering new insights into evolutionary biology, gene function, and shared pathways. Whether you’re studying insect genetics, developmental biology, or comparative genomics, the expanded ortholog data opens up new possibilities for research. Check out our previous blog to learn how to access the orthologs using NCBI Datasets.
What’s new?
New species: Non-insect arthropod species are now included to identify one-to-one orthologs with Drosophila (fruit fly), enriching the existing dataset with genes from over 45 additional species including spiders and ticks.
Expanded Ortholog Data for Hymenoptera: We have further enriched the insect dataset with over 250,000 one-to-one orthologs found within the order Hymenoptera (ants, wasps, and bees), identified by comparison to the Apis mellifera (honeybee) gene set, supplementing the more broadly conserved orthologs shared with Drosophila.
Example:
The apisimin genes of honeybees encode a peptide component of royal jelly, which fulfills the nutritional needs of the queen bee. Because these genes are specific to honeybees, they were absent from ortholog datasets that used fruit flies as a reference. However, with the recent expansion of ortholog data incorporating honeybees as an additional reference, five apisimin genes in different Apis species have now been identified as orthologs. This expansion allows you to study thousands of genes that are unique to order Hymenoptera.
Figure 1: NCBI’s Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) Viewer displaying honeybee apisimin ortholog proteins generated using NCBI COBALT. Amino acid residues conserved across the five orthologs are depicted in gray while unconserved residues are highlighted in red.
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Questions?
you have questions or would like to provide feedback, please reach out to us at [email protected].