HOMECAT: consensus homologs mapping for interspecific knowledge transfer and functional genomic data integration

Motivation: Comparative studies are encouraged by the fast in- crease of data availability from the latest high-throughput tech- niques, in particular from functional genomic studies. Yet the size of datasets, the challenge of complete orthologs findings and not last, the variety of identification formats, make information integration challenging. With HOMECAT we aim to facilitate cross-species rela- tionship identification and data mapping, by combining orthology predictions from several publicly available sources, a convenient interface for high-throughput data download and automatic identifier conversion into a Cytoscape plug-in, that provides both an integra- tion with a large set of bioinformatics tools as well as a user friendly interface.