It aims at developing a curated resource that gives reliable information about ortholog and paralog assignments, and evolutionary history of various gene families.

It also tries to include outgroup genes like yeast (S.cerevisiae and S. pombe) and plant (A. thaliana) to reveal these distant members.

Unlike other pairwise alignment based ones, TreeFam infers orthologs by means of gene trees.

TreeFam uses this information to evaluate tree building, guide manual curation, and infer complex ortholog and paralog relations.

TreeFam is being run as a project at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and its software is housed on SourceForge as "TreeSoft".