SHOOT: phylogenetic gene search and ortholog inference

Abstract

Determining the evolutionary relationships between genes is fundamental to comparative biological research. Here we present the phylogenetic search, SHOOT. SHOOT searches a user query sequence against a database of phylogenetic trees and returns a tree with the query sequence correctly placed within it. We show that SHOOT performs this analysis with comparable speed to a BLAST search. We demonstrate that SHOOT phylogenetic placements are as accurate as conventional tree inference and it can identify orthologs with high accuracy. In summary, SHOOT is a fast and accurate tool for phylogenetic analyses of novel query sequences. It is available online at www.shoot.bio.