Frequently Asked Questions

Q. How do I save items to the Clipboard utility?
A. Use the Send To button after selecting Clipboard from the pulldown menu. This feature will appear on the HomoloGene Summary page, and all other HomoloGene reports.

Q. Are HomoloGene IDs stable?
A.HomoloGene IDs should be relatively stable. A group is assigned an existing id as long as it contains more than 50% of the genes from the currently existing group. This means that as long as the algorithm doesn't change drastically, they should be remain fairly the same from build to build. Right now, since we are in the process of modifying the algorithms quite a bit, so the grouping will change quite frequently, making the IDs less stable.

Also, if you happen to encounter an entry that has been retired, the page for that entry will now show information about the homologene ids the genes now belong to.

Q. How are the PubMed articles selected?
A. The selected PubMed articles have three sources:
Publications related to a gene in the HomoloGene cluster through a known gene function
Publications related to the first group according to PubMed's Related Articles computed links
Publications manually linked to genes by PubMed's indexing staff
The list is pruned to eliminate weakly related publications and those that discuss large numbers of genes.

Q. How do you determine which species should be included in HomoloGene?
A. According to the current policy, we only include species that have either a complete genome or at least 10,000 UniGene entries.