BOL

Imagine trying to reconstruct a family tree when many family photographs are missing, some names are unclear, and different relatives remember the past differently. This is similar to the challenge scientists face when trying to understand how organisms are related. Their family records are genomes, and the family tree is a phylogenetic tree. With modern sequencing technologies, scientists now have access to thousands of genomes, but comparing them can be difficult, especially when genomes are incomplete or poorly annotated.

A recent study by Webster and Chapman introduces Buscogeny (https://github.com/Jwebster89/Buscogeny, an open-source bioinformatics pipeline designed to make this process easier. The tool uses BUSCO (Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs), which identifies conserved genes that are expected to occur as single copies in particular groups of organisms. These genes act like evolutionary landmarks, allowing researchers to compare genomes and investigate their relationships.

Buscogeny brings several steps of phylogenomic analysis into one workflow. It identifies BUSCO genes, extracts and aligns their sequences, removes unreliable regions, combines information from multiple genes, and uses the resulting data to construct a phylogenetic tree. It also provides quality-control information, helping researchers identify genomes that may be too incomplete for reliable analysis.

The authors demonstrate the usefulness of Buscogeny with bacterial and fungal genomes, including Alternaria. This is particularly valuable because fungal genomes can vary greatly in quality and annotation. Ultimately, Buscogeny helps transform massive amounts of genomic data into an understandable evolutionary story. Each DNA sequence becomes a clue, each conserved gene becomes a landmark, and together these clues reveal a picture of how life is connected.

More at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10123-025-00752-6?