Reciprocal best hits are not a logically sufficient condition for orthology
Abstract
Description
It is common to use reciprocal best hits, also known as a boomerang criterion, for determining orthology between sequences. The best hits may be found by blast, or by other more recently developed algorithms. Previous work seems to have assumed that reciprocal best hits is a sufficient but not necessary condition for orthology. In this article, I explain why reciprocal best hits cannot logically be a sufficient condition for orthology. If reciprocal best hits is neither sufficient nor necessary for orthology, it would seem worthwhile to examine further the logical foundations of some unsupervised algorithms that are used to identify orthologs.