Cross-species Comparison for Identifying Orthologous Simple Sequence Repeats of Disease Genes

Simple sequence repeats (SSRs) have been demonstrated to affect normal gene function to cause different genetic disorders. Several conserved and even partial functional SSR patterns were discovered in inherited orthologous disease genes. To explore a wide range of SSRs in genetic diseases, a system focuses on orthologous SSRs for disease genes through comparative genomics mechanism is constructed in this research. The system is developed by employing the OMIM (Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man) and the NCBI HomoloGene databases as the resources of human genetic diseases and homologous gene information. In addition, The Comparative Genomics for SSR discovery system (CS-SSR) is also adopted for providing annotated SSR information among various model species. By integrating these data resources and data mining technologies, biologists and doctors can retrieve novel and important conserved SSRs information among orthologous disease genes. The proposed system named as Orthologous SSR for Disease Gene (OSDG) is a comprehensive andefficient online tool for discovering conserved SSRs of disease genes and it is freely available at http://osdg.cs.ntou.edu.tw.