Using OrthoCluster for the detection of synteny blocks among multiple genomes.

Synteny blocks are composed of two or more orthologous genes conserved among species, resulting from speciation from their last common ancestor. OrthoCluster (Zeng et al., 2008) is a fast and easy-to-use program for the identification of synteny blocks among multiple genomes. It allows users to identify synteny blocks that contain different types of mismatches, and to decide whether they require conservation of gene orientation and conservation of gene order within the blocks. OrthoCluster can also be used to find duplicated blocks within genomes. Although genes and their correspondence are usually used as input for OrthoCluster, in fact, OrthoCluster can be applied using any type of markers as input as long as their relationships can be established. OrthoClusterDB provides a Web interface for running OrthoCluster with user-defined datasets and parameters, as well as for browsing and downloading precomputed synteny blocks for different groups of genomes.