Synolog: A Scalable Synteny-Based Framework for Genome Architecture Characterization

Abstract

Detailing the genomic architecture across multiple organisms has been a task performed for decades. The continuing growth of genomic datasets not only serves as a resource for studying genome evolution but warrants the availability of scalable and user-friendly software for processing these datasets. Here, we present Synolog, a bioinformatic toolkit that can automatically identify orthologs for both protein-coding and non-coding genes, synteny clusters across two or more genomes, as well as retrogenes, and segmental duplications. Applying Synolog, we illustrate cases of local gene expansions in ecologically disparate turtle species, identify synteny clusters across hundreds of millions of years of metazoan evolution, and reconstruct chromosome-level assemblies in teleosts using the inferred synteny clusters; all using its integrated visual features. In parallel, we compare our orthogroup method to that of commonly used software and note the tradeoffs of making inferences solely based on sequence similarity versus a synteny-based approach.