Can ERGO™ be used to predict functions in eukaryotes?
YES!!! One of the strongest aspects of ERGO™ is its diverse database encompassing genomes from all domains of life (eukaryotes, archaea and bacteria). Due to its integration of biochemical pathways with genomic, microarray and wet lab data, ERGO™ visualizes chromosomal, biochemical, structural, or regulatory patterns not seen when viewed from only one perspective. These patterns help to figure out the ‘missing pieces’ that cannot be identified with conventional similarity searches. Quite often the patterns are not present in the organism of most interest to the investigator but a distant relative either in the same domain or across domains. ERGO™ takes advantage of this information and extrapolates it to genomes that do not exhibit the pattern, most notably the eukaryotes. This approach has been very effective in ‘filling in’ missing pieces of metabolism in the some eukaryotes since many metabolic pathways are shared between prokaryotes and eukaryotes.
