An Orthologous Group Clustering Technique based on the Grid Computing

Orthologs are genes having the same function across different species that specialize from a single gene in the last common ancestor of these species. Orthologous groups are useful in the genome annotation, studies on gene evolution, and comparative genomics. However, the construction of an orthologous group is difficult to automate and it takes so much time. It is also hard to guarantee the accuracy of the constructed orthologous groups. We propose a system to construct orthologous groups on many genomes automatically and rapidly. We utilize the grid computing to reduce the sequence alignment time, and we use clustering algorithm in the application of database to automate whole processes. We have generated orthologous groups for 20 complete prokaryotes genomes just in a day because of the grid computing. Furthermore, new genomes can be accommodated easily by the clustering algorithm and grid computing. We compared the generated orthologous groups with COGs (Clusters of orthologous Group of proteins) and KO (KEGG Ortholog). The comparison shows about 85 percent similarity compared with previous well-known orthologous databases.