Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

The Quest for Orthologs (QfO) is a biannual meeting, held biannually since 2009 with limited support, driven by the QfO Consortium. The eigth edition of the meeting (QFO8) will be held in Montreal in 2024. Orthology inference is a fundamental step in evolutionary genomics. It forms the basis of reconstructing the evolutionary relationships of genes and the genomes they reside in, and it contributes to unravelling the genetic basis underlying the commonalities and specifics of contemporary but also of extinct species. The QFO Consortium aims to bring together disparate groups around the world that work in the field. Joint meetings served to accelerate progress in the field through sharing of ideas, methods and research findings. Among others, they resulted in the development of shared resources and standards for assessing the accuracy of evolutionary reconstructions through standardized benchmarking (https://orthology.benchmarkservice.org). Several recent advances in the field have now led to the identification of four focal areas that require the joint attention of the community. (i) The number of species with whole-genome sequences available grows exponentially, which makes the computational complexity of the orthology inference a severe bottleneck; (ii) Recent major advances in protein structure prediction (resulting in Alphafold2) promise to provide complementary information that could aid in the identification of deep orthology relationships; (iii) Increasing insights into the functional diversity and relevance of non-conding RNAs render the development of dedicated orthology inference tools for ncRNAs a must; (iv) Viral pathogens increasingly affect the health of humans and livestock. This demands a community-driven process to develop tools and standards for orthology inference in viruses, which will aid in the reconstruction of the evolutionary trajectory that gave rise to these pathogens.