• September 24, 2010: A manuscript entitled "Large synteny blocks revealed between Caenorhabditis elegans and Caenorhabditis briggsae genomes using OrthoCluster." by Ismael A Vergara and Nansheng Chen is published in BMC Genomics. This manuscript demonstrates that OrthoCluster can be used to effectively identify synteny blocks between two nematode genomes.
• July 20, 2009: A manuscript entitled "Polymorphic segmental duplications in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans" by Ismael A Vergara, Allan K Mah, Jim C Huang, Maja Tarailo-Graovac, Robert C Johnsen, David L Baillie, and Nansheng Chen will appear in BMC Genomics. This manuscript describes segmental duplications discovered in C. elegans using OrthoCluster. Genotyping experiments confirmed the existence of the largest segmental duplication and revealed that the largest segmental duplication is polymorphic in laboratory N2 strains. Ismael Vergara won a poster prize for presenting this work at the 17^th International C. elegans Meeting in Los Angeles in 2009.
• June 12, 2009: A manuscript entitled "OrthoClusterDB: an online platform for synteny blocks" by Man-Ping Ng, Ismael A Vergara, Christian Frech, Qingkang Chen, Xinghuo Zeng, Jian Pei and Nansheng Chen will appear in BMC Bioinformatics.
• June 1, 2009: A book chapter entitled "Using OrthoCluster for the detection of synteny blocks among multiple genomes" by Ismael Vergara and Nansheng Chen willl be published in the Current Protocols in Bioinformatics.
• December 22, 2008: OrthoClusterDB release 2 is now available. Please send questions and suggestions to orthocluster-help@sfu.ca
• August 24, 2008: Ismael Vergara will give a platform presentation on OrthoCluster and OrthoClusterDB at the Joint CSHL/Wellcome Trust Genome Informatics Meeting (Sept 10 - 14, 2008) at the Wellcome Trust Conference Center on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton, UK. His title is "Comparative analysis of genomic structural variations in multiple species".
• August 12, 2008: OrthoClusterDB release 1 is available. Please send questions and suggestions to orthocluster-help@sfu.ca
• March 25-30, 2008: Jian Pei attended the 11th International Conferences on Extending Database Technology (EDBT'08), Nantes, France. The title of this presentation is "OrthoCluster: A New Tool for Mining Syntenic Blocks and Applications in Comparative Genomics", which is published in the proceeding of this conference. [PDF]

       OrthoClusterDB is an informatics systems that provides Internet access to the synteny block identifying program OrthoCluster, and access to pre-computed synteny block databases obtained by running OrthoCluster for different groups of sequenced genomes. The development of OrthoCluster and OrthoClusterDB is supported by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grants, a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (MSFHR) Establishment Grant, and Simon Fraser University Community Trust Endowment Fund (CTEF).

• Cite OrthoClusterDB: Ng et al., "OrthoClusterDB: a web server for synteny blocks" (BMC Bioinformatics).
• How to use OrthoCluster: Vergara and Chen, "Using OrthoCluster for the detection of synteny blocks among multiple genomes" (Current Protocols in Bioinformatics).
• Cite OrthoCluster: Zeng et al., "OrthoCluster: A New Tool for Mining Syntenic Blocks and Applications in Comparative Genomics". In Proceedings of the 11th International Conferences on Extending Database Technology (EDBT'08), Nantes, France, March 25-30, 2008.  [PDF]