AlignScope: A visual mining tool for gene team finding with whole genome alignment

One of the main issues in comparative genomics is the study of chromosomal gene order in one or more related species. Recently identifying sets of orthologous genes in several genomes has become getting important, since a cluster of similar genes helps us to predict the function of unknown genes. For this purpose, the whole genome alignment is usually used to determine horizontal gene transfer, gene duplication, and gene loss between two related genomes. Also it is well known that a novel visualization tool of the whole genome alignment would be very useful for understanding genome organization and the evolutionary process. In this paper, we propose a method for identifying and visualizing the alignment of the whole genome alignment, especially for detecting gene clusters between two aligned genomes. Since the current rigorous algorithm for finding gene clusters has strong and artificial constraints, they are not useful for coping with "noisy" alignments. We developed the system AlignScope to provide a simplified structure for genome alignment at any level, and also to help us to find gene clusters. In this experiment, we have tested AlignScope on several microbial genomes.