Fig. 2

Gene-family founder detection framework implemented in GenEra. Overview of the pipeline for sensitive gene-family founder detection across the tree of life. A Flowchart of the command-line tool GenEra. Solid arrows/elements represent the mandatory steps in the pipeline, while the dashed arrows/elements represent optional steps to enrich the results. B Graphic representation of the rationale behind the taxonomic representativeness score. GenEra first performs a taxonomic trace-back to determine the most distantly related homolog to a query species, and then tracks back the presence of homologs in all the intermediate taxonomic levels, which helps to detect putative contaminants in the query proteome, horizontal gene transfer events between increasingly distantly related taxa, or false positive matches to the database