Entering edit mode
7.5 years ago
fana
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40
I am trying to find miRNA ortholgues between human and chick. Is it valid to say that the ones with exactly the same name are ortholgues? For example, hsa-let-7a-2-3p and gga-let-7a-2-3p.
I would call them "conserved" more than orthologues, I THINK it is more appropriate.
By definition orthologs are genes whose last common ancestor was a speciation event. You can't infer this from gene names or even just aligning two sequences. You need a phylogenetic tree. It could be that the genes were named the same because a phylogenetic tree shows them to be orthologous but you need to verify this before concluding that they are orthologs because they have the same name.