Microinversions in mammalian evolution.
We propose an approach for identifying microinversions across different species and show that microinversions provide a source of low-homoplasy evolutionary characters. These characters may be used as "certificates" to verify different branches in a phylogenetic tree, turning the challenging problem of phylogeny reconstruction into a relatively simple algorithmic problem. We estimate that there exist hundreds of thousands of microinversions in genomes of mammals from comparative sequencing projects, an untapped source of new phylogenetic characters.
Chaisson
M J
MJ
Bioinformatics Program and Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA. mchaisso@bioinf.ucsd.edu
Raphael
B J
BJ
Pevzner
P A
PA
D000818:Animals; D005075:Biological Evolution; D019295:Computational Biology; D005822:Genetic Vectors / Q000235:genetics; D006801:Humans; D008322:Mammals