Software

GOTax: investigating biological processes and biochemical activities along the taxonomic tree

Andreas Schlicker , Jörg Rahnenführer , Mario Albrecht , Thomas Lengauer and Francisco S Domingues

Department of Computational Biology and Applied Algorithmics, Max-Planck-Institute for Informatics, Stuhlsatzenhausweg, 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany

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Genome Biology 2007, 8:R33doi:10.1186/gb-2007-8-3-r33

Published:	8 March 2007

Subject areas: Genome studies, Bioinformatics

Abstract

We describe GOTax, a comparative genomics platform that integrates protein annotation with protein family classification and taxonomy. User-defined sets of proteins, protein families, annotation terms or taxonomic groups can be selected and compared, allowing for the analysis of distribution of biological processes and molecular activities over different taxonomic groups. In particular, a measure of functional similarity is available for comparing proteins and protein families, establishing functional relationships independent of evolution.