title: Microinversions in mammalian evolution.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Bioinformatics Program and Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA. mchaisso@bioinf.ucsd.edu
authors.forename: M J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Chaisson
authors.forename: B J
authors.initials: BJ
authors.lastname: Raphael
authors.forename: P A
authors.initials: PA
authors.lastname: Pevzner
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D005075:Biological Evolution; D019295:Computational Biology; D005822:Genetic Vectors / Q000235:genetics; D006801:Humans; D008322:Mammals