Crossing Isorthology and Microsynteny to Resolve Multigenic Families Functional Annotation

Despite the increasing availability of complete genomes and detailed protein annotations, highly paralogous gene families suffer the lack of precise functional annotation. Consequently, those genes are poorly or erroneously annotated in most genome releases. With the thousands of upcoming prokaryotic genomes, automated methods for the reliable transfer of annotation to sequences fulfilling the same function are becoming key to fully benefit these data. We present a generic strategy to identify, across multiple genomes, sets of genes most likely to have kept the same biological function.