319-Spacedust: Discovery of Conserved Gene Clusters
The paper introduces Spacedust, a novel computational tool created for the systematic, de novo discovery of conserved gene clusters (CGCs) in microbial and viral genomes, aiming to overcome the bottleneck of poor functional annotation in metagenomics. The software improves upon prior methods by employing highly sensitive protein structure comparison via Foldseek to find remote homologous matches that sequence-based methods often miss. To confirm the significance of these genetic neighborhoods, Spacedust utilizes novel statistical metrics based on clustering and ordering P values, allowing it…
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