HomeBecause of the advent of high-throughput sequencing techniques and the consequent reductionin cost of sequencing, we are seeing an explosion in the amount of genomic data of all types, from collections of isolated genes to collections of unknown organisms to complex Eukaryotic genomes.In particular, the availability of fully sequenced and well annotated genomes allows us to move beyond the mere sequence level in the study of genomic evolution.
Once a genome has been annotated to the point where gene homologs can be identified, each gene family can be assigned a unique integer and each chromosome represented by an ordering of signed integers, where the sign indicates the strand. Rearrangement of genes under reversal, transposition, and other operations such as duplications, deletions and insertions, then amount to changes of these orderings. Such rearrangements are known to be an important evolutionary mechanism.
Because rearrangements of genes are “rare genomic events”, these orderings enable the reconstruction of evolutionary events far back in time. Biologists have embraced this new source of data in their phylogenetic work and also in comparative genomics.
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