Targeted ortholog search in unannotated genome assemblies with fDOG-Assembly.

fDOG-Assembly identifies orthologs in unannotated genomes with accuracy comparable to traditional tools, revealing gene presence missed by conventional annotations.

• Why it matters: Many newly assembled genomes lack gene annotations, limiting their use in evolutionary and functional studies, and creating a need for methods that can directly analyze raw assemblies.
• What they did: fDOG-Assembly (fDA) employs feature architecture-aware ortholog searches in unannotated genomes, benchmarking shows it matches the performance of BUSCO and Compleasm across thousands of genes.
• The result: fDA uncovers orthologs missed by standard methods, enabling insights into gene distribution, such as widespread beta-lactam biosynthesis in soil invertebrates, and enhances phylogenetic analyses of unannotated genomes.