Orthology Inference in Nonmodel Organisms Using Transcriptomes and Low-Coverage Genomes: Improving Accuracy and Matrix Occupancy for Phylogenomics

Orthology inference is central to phylogenomic analyses. Phylogenomic data sets commonly include transcriptomes and low-coverage genomes that are incomplete and contain errors and isoforms. These properties can severely violate the underlying assumptions of orthology inference with existing heuristics. We present a procedure that uses phylogenies for both homology and orthology assignment. The procedure first uses similarity scores to infer putative homologs that are then aligned, constructed into phylogenies, and pruned of spurious branches caused by deep paralogs, misassembly, frameshifts, or recombination. These final homologs are then used to identify orthologs. We explore four alternative tree-based orthology inference approaches, of which two are new. These accommodate gene and genome duplications as well as gene tree discordance. We demonstrate these methods in three published data sets including the grape family, Hymenoptera, and millipedes with divergence times ranging from approximately 100 to over 400 Ma. The procedure significantly increased the completeness and accuracy of the inferred homologs and orthologs. We also found that data sets that are more recently diverged and/or include more high-coverage genomes had more complete sets of orthologs. To explicitly evaluate sources of conflicting phylogenetic signals, we applied serial jackknife analyses of gene regions keeping each locus intact. The methods described here can scale to over 100 taxa. They have been implemented in python with independent scripts for each step, making it easy to modify or incorporate them into existing pipelines. All scripts are available from https://bitbucket.org/yangya/phylogenomic_dataset_construction.