Answer to Question #119809 in Bioinformatics for Christopher

Question

Breifly explain the concept of ortholog and paralog

Answer 1

Orthologs are sequences (proteins or genes) that descended from the same ancestral sequence and are separated by the divergence of species. For example, if gene A was present in the common ancestor of chimpanzee and human, gene A of chimpanzee and human gene A are orthologs. Paralogs are sequences (proteins or genes) that were produced due to duplication in the last common ancestor. As a result, human genes A and A' are paralogs if the were formed during the duplication of the gene A in the human ancestor.