What is the goal of curation?
The goal of curation is to ensure that the phylogenetic tree for a family accurately reflects the orthology relationships and history of gene duplications and losses in the family. Orthology, gene duplication and loss make sense in the context of a phylogenetic tree. However, automatic trees are often incorrect, either because of poor data quality or because the tree reconstruction algorithm assumes an unrealistic model of evolution. There is currently no tree reconstruction algorithm that can solve these difficulties. We believe that orthology and paralogy statements must be consistent with the tree we present. Therefore, to improve the accuracy with which TreeFam reflects the orthology relationships and history of gene duplications and losses in a family, our approach is that human experts manually curate the automatic trees. The curators only edit a tree if additional phylogenetic analyses and information such as gene function strongly suggest that the automatic tree is incorrect. W
