Last Updated on March 19, 2022 by QCity Editorial Stuff
Orthologs are species that share a common ancestry, whereas paralogs share a common ancestor but diverge into two different species.
An ortholog is a gene that has evolved to perform the same function as another. For example, hemoglobin is an ortholog of myoglobin, which helps store oxygen.
A paralog is a gene that has evolved to perform a different function than another. For example, myosin-light-chain-2 is a paralog of actin-myosin light chain 1, which helps muscle contractions along with proteins like tropomyosin and troponins.
The word “ortholog” is mainly used in genetics. It is used to describe genes that are found in the same species but were derived from different ancestors.
Paralogs, on the other hand, are genes that are found in different species but were derived from the same ancestor.
Comparison Between Ortholog And Paralog
| Parameters of Comparison | ortholog | paralog |
| Ancestor | Orthologs are species that share a common ancestry | whereas paralogs share a common ancestor |
| Gene | Paralogs are genes that have evolved from the same ancestral gene. | Orthologs are genes that evolved from different ancestral genes |
| Species | Orthologs are the genes that are similar in two separate species | Whereas paralogs are the genes that are similar in one species but not in another. |
| Meaning | The word ortholog comes from the Greek meaning “correct form” | The word paralog comes from the Greek meaning “incorrect form”. |
What Is Ortholog?
Ortholog is a word coined by Carl Woese in 1967. It means “an ancient or primitive species with close relations to modern forms”. It refers to the idea that all the species of life on Earth are related but their last common ancestor is unknown.
Orthologous genes are similar in sequence between two species when they share a common ancestor. Many scientists think that these genes tend to be more conserved during evolution and it is believed that this helps them perform better in a given environment.
It is an “orthology”, meaning the same, which means it’s a duplicate of another organism. It has been suggested that orthologs have evolved from paralogs by undergoing gene duplication followed by divergence.
Orthologs are genes that have evolved on different branches of the tree of life, that is, on different species or different genera. They have often changed function slightly over time.
This refers to an organism’s “adoptive parent”. This organism has evolved from an ancestor that split off from its lineage about 100 million years ago. The new organism is called its “ancestor”, and it can be considered to be more closely related to this ancestor than it is to its progenitor.
What Is Paralog?
A paralog is a short story in science fiction or fantasy literature in which the author provides a commentary on the work’s universe by describing an alternative universe. It is also the name for this kind of story in some video games.
One popular type of paralog is “Redshirts,” where the protagonist loses his life on an away team to save one person who then becomes famous instead.
This is a story about a boy named Matthew who loved to read. He would often come across the word “paralog” in his favorite fantasy stories, but he could never figure out what it meant.
One day, while Matthew was doing his homework, he found a book that explained what paralog meant, and every time he saw the word in his stories, he would be able to understand its meaning.
Paralog is a term that comes from ancient Greek. Paralog means “further story.” In ancient Greece, a paralog was a narrative that took place after the events in the novel. In English, the word “paralog” can be used in various contexts to refer to an event in the story that follows the ending of a novel or an ending of a chapter in a long work.
10 Differences Between Ortholog And Paralog
Gene: Paralogs are genes that have evolved from the same ancestral gene. These genes share a common ancestor and therefore, DNA sequence homologies can be found within these paralogs.
Species: Orthologs are genes that evolved from different ancestral genes and share no common ancestors. Orthologs can show up in two or more species while paralogs can only be found in one species. This is because orthologs and paralogs were created by each other for their respective functions and did not evolve independently.
Ancestor: The difference between ortholog and paralog is that ortholog is a gene that has arisen from the same ancestor, while paralog is a gene that arose from a different ancestor.
Biological Evolution: The terms ortholog and paralog are related to biological evolution. Orthologs are the genes that are similar in two separate species. Whereas paralogs are the genes that are similar in one species but not in another.
Duplicate gene: An ortholog is a gene that has arisen by duplication of an ancestral gene. A paralog is a gene that arose by duplication of another ancestral gene.
Meaning: The word ortholog comes from the Greek meaning “correct form”. The word ortholog means the same thing in evolution as it does in grammar. The word paralog comes from the Greek meaning “incorrect form”.
Binary Distinction: The binary distinction between ortholog and paralog is a biological principle in genetics. It states that the genes in closely related organisms are similar because they descended from a single common ancestor, and the ones in distantly related organisms are dissimilar because they descended from two different ancestors.
Origin: There are two types of genes, orthologs, and paralogs. Orthologs are genes that originated from the same species and paralogs are genes that originated from a different species. Paralog is a more popular term than “ortholog” these days.
Horizontal: A paralog is an alternative version of a gene arising in parallel with its original gene in the genome. A paralog might be silent or spliced into an ortholog, spread by the process of horizontal gene transfer.
Different Structure: Orthologs have the same function, but they might have evolved different structures or have been swapped with other genes. Paralogs have a similar function as ortholog but they might be structurally different, so they may perform their functions in different ways.
Interesting Statistics Or Facts Of Ortholog
1. Orthologs are the proteins that are produced by the same gene in different species.
2. The human genome contains around 20,000 genes while 40,000 genes have orthologs in the mouse.
3. Orthologs in humans have been classified into up to 500 groups in total.
4 . An ortholog is a type of gene that has been duplicated by evolution from a single ancestral gene in different species.
5. In humans, there are about 24,510 genes in total. Out of which 23,912 are the same across all humans and only 98 are unique to humans alone.
6. The human genome contains 4 billion base pairs and it took more than 10 years to decode.
7. It is estimated that there were over 100 million species on Earth before the emergence of modern man and 150 million before the dinosaurs roamed the earth.
8. The orthologs are called so because they are the genes that have somewhat changed over time, but neither evolved into a new species nor lost their functions.
9. Orthologous genes share similar sequences of DNA. Some of these sequences are found in the same position on each species’ chromosomes and some are found in different positions. The first thing that happens when a gene is duplicated is a structural rearrangement of its sequence, which takes place in one or more steps along its length.
10. All living organisms have two sets of homologous chromosomes through which they pass their genetic information from generation to generation.
Interesting Statistics Or Facts Of Paralog
1) Paralog is a database of nearly 3,000 scientific terms that are co-occurrence with the terms in the text. It’s used to create searchable databases for scientific papers.
2) Paralogs can be used to automatically categorize documents by topic, author, language, and more! With paralog, one could even classify text by its punctuation or sentence structure! Paralog is an extremely handy tool for researchers who need to analyze data sets with large amounts of words and sentence fragments.
3) If you’re a researcher looking for an easy way to classify documents according to their topics and subjects then paralog might be what you need! Check out this quick video
4) Paralog is a statistical tool that helps you answer questions about numbers. It does this by finding the possible combinations of numbers and ratios that lead to the correct answer.
5) In the paralog, a paralog is an artificial analog to a biological analog. Paralogs are expressions of the same entity in different languages or forms. They can be a verb or a noun in a sentence. The statement “There is an apple on my desk” contains two paralogs: apple and on.
6) Paralog is a word coined from the Greek language and means “double talk.” It is a term for something that cannot be trusted because it has hidden meanings and connotations.
7) The etymology of the word “paralog” comes from Greek, meaning “double talk.”
8) A paralogy is an extended metaphor, such as in Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet where he compares Paris to a sheaf of wheat.
9) The average person speaks around 150 words per minute (WPM), or about 5 words per second (WPS).
10) There are approximately 30 trillion neurons in our brain – that’s 1,000 times more than what has been previously estimated by
Conclusion About The Differences Between Ortholog And Paralog
The Ortholog classification is a taxonomic category used in molecular biology. It is the class of genes that are related to each other by duplication, divergence, and mutation.
Paralogs are found on the same chromosome as their original gene but are not identical. Some paralogs may have evolved into separate proteins while some may have been eliminated from the genome altogether.
The conclusion is that orthologs are similar in function to paralogs, but they developed separately.
References:
Resource 01: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/biochemistry-genetics-and-molecular-biology/orthology
Resource 02: https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-2001-2-8-interactions1002
