Conserved Segment Statistics and Rearrangement Inferences in Comparative Genomics

Source abstract

Abstract ‘l’he statistical treatment of chromosomal rearrangement has evolved along with the biological methods for producing pertinent data. We trace the development of conserved segment sta.tistics1 from the mouse linkage/human chromosome assignment data analysed by Nadeau and Taylor in 1984, through the comparative gene-order information on organelles (late 1980s) and prokaryotes (mid-1990s), to higher eukaryote genome sequences, whose rearrangements have been studied without prior gene identification. Each new type of data suggested new questions and led to new analyses. We focus on the problems introduced when small sequence fragments are treated as noise in the inference of rearrangement history.