TY - JOUR T1 - Testing the Ortholog Conjecture with Comparative Functional Genomic Data from Mammals A1 - Nehrt, Nathan L. A1 - Clark, Wyatt T. A1 - Radivojac, Predrag A1 - Hahn, Matthew W. Y1 - 2011/06/09 N2 - Author Summary The use of model organisms in biological research rests upon the assumption that gene and protein functions discovered in one organism are likely to be the same or similar in another organism. Hence, the assumption that experiments in mouse will tell us about the function of genes in humans. A guiding principle in the assignment of function from one organism to another is that single-copy genes (“orthologs”) are statistically more likely to provide functional information than are multi-copy genes, whether in the same organism or different organisms. Here we have tested this idea by examining genes with known functions in human and mouse. Surprisingly, we find that multi-copy genes are equally or more likely to provide accurate functional information than are single-copy genes. Our results suggest that the organism itself plays at least as large a role in determining the function of genes as does the particular sequence of the gene alone. This insight will benefit the assignment of function to genes whose roles are not yet known by widening the pool of appropriate genes from which function can be inferred. JF - PLOS Computational Biology JA - PLOS Computational Biology VL - 7 IS - 6 UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002073 SP - e1002073 EP - PB - Public Library of Science M3 - doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002073 ER -