Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on November 19, 2007
Bioinformatics 2008 24(2):151-157; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btm567
MANTIS: a phylogenetic framework for multi-species genome comparisons


1Laboratory of Evolutionary Genetics, Institute for Molecular Biology & Medicine, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 12 rue Jeener & Brachet, B6041 Gosselies and 2Bioinformatics & Evolutionary Genomics, Department of Plant Systems Biology, Ghent University, VIB, Gent, Belgium
*To whom correspondence should be addressed.
| Abstract |
|---|
Motivation: Practitioners of comparative genomics face huge analytical challenges as whole genome sequences and functional/expression data accumulate. Furthermore, the field would greatly benefit from a better integration of this wealth of data with evolutionary concepts.
Results: Here, we present MANTIS, a relational database for the analysis of (i) gains and losses of genes on specific branches of the metazoan phylogeny, (ii) reconstructed genome content of ancestral species and (iii) over- or under-representation of functions/processes and tissue specificity of gained, duplicated and lost genes. MANTIS estimates the most likely positions of gene losses on the true phylogeny using a maximum-likelihood function. A user-friendly interface and an extensive query system allow to investigate questions pertaining to gene identity, phylogenetic mapping and function/expression parameters.
Availability: MANTIS is freely available at http://www.mantisdb.org and constitutes the missing link between multi-species genome comparisons and functional analyses.
Contact: mcmilink{at}ulb.ac.be
Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
The authors wish it to be known that, in their opinion, the first two authors should be regarded as joint First Authors.
Associate Editor: Martin Bishop
Received on September 22, 2007; revised on November 7, 2007; accepted on November 7, 2007