What do you use the CLANS program for?

Question

I am reading this paper called Birth and death in the Terminal Complement pathway, doi : https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.04.21.489004 where they have performed CLANS analysis. I understand that CLANS performs blast and visually represents the results as clusters.

What does these clusters mean and is there meaning to the distance between them?

And in the perspective of the paper, what does the CLANS analysis tell the researchers?

Thank you, I am still a student, sorry if this is a simple question. And I have attached a screenshot from the supplementary materials of the article

Answer 1

CLANS (Clustering Locus-specific ANnotationS) is a bioinformatics tool that uses BLAST to compare a set of nucleotide or protein sequences to a reference database and visualizes the results as clusters, where each cluster represents a group of similar sequences, the distance between the clusters represents the degree of similarity between the sequences in each cluster. In the context of the paper you are reading, the CLANS analysis likely helped the researchers to identify functional domains within the Terminal Complement pathway, and the clusters formed by the CLANS analysis could represent different functional domains or sub-systems within the pathway, and the distance between the clusters could indicate the degree of similarity or dissimilarity between these domains.