W050 Annotation and Nomenclature; An Example: Zebrafish

Date: Sunday, January 15, 2012
Time: 9:05 AM
Room: Royal Palm Salons 3-4
John Postlethwait , University of Oregon, eugene, OR
Zebrafish offers advantages for investigating principles of vertebrate development, physiology, and toxicology, and provides important models for human disease thanks to mutations in hundreds of genes. The connection of zebrafish biology to the biology of humans and other vertebrates requires nomenclature that correctly identifies orthologies. Identification of zebrafish orthologs of human genes is sometimes difficult due to an anciently duplicated genome shared with all teleosts (the teleost genome duplication, TGD) in addition to two rounds of genome duplication (R1 and R2, the vertebrate genome duplications or VGDs) shared by zebrafish, humans, and other vertebrates. Ohnologs (paralogs derived from genome duplication) that originated in the VGDs have sometimes disappeared reciprocally in zebrafish and human lineages resulting in ohnologs gone missing, a situation in which zebrafish has no copy of the human gene and human has no copy of the zebrafish gene; these situations provide a problem for nomenclature, but understanding them is essential for accurate connectivity of zebrafish and human genomes.