Jonathan A. Eisen

The increasingly large number of sequences available in public databases makes searches slower and slower. We clustered the NCBI non-redundant protein database and calculated taxonomic info for each cluster. This collapses similar sequences and reduces the database by over half.

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is the exchange of DNA between species. It can lead to the acquisition of new gene functions, so finding HGT events can reveal genome novelty. preHGT is a pipeline that uses multiple existing methods to quickly screen for transferred genes.

We want to find and use evolutionary innovations to solve present-day problems. We developed NovelTree, an efficient phylogenomic workflow that will empower us to decode the evolutionary traces of these innovations across the tree of life.