title: YOC, A new strategy for pairwise alignment of collinear genomes.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Comparing and aligning genomes is a key step in analyzing closely related genomes. Despite the development of many genome aligners in the last 15 years, the problem is not yet fully resolved, even when aligning closely related bacterial genomes of the same species. In addition, no procedures are available to assess the quality of genome alignments or to compare genome aligners.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We designed an original method for pairwise genome alignment, named YOC, which employs a highly sensitive similarity detection method together with a recent collinear chaining strategy that allows overlaps. YOC improves the reliability of collinear genome alignments, while preserving or even improving sensitivity. We also propose an original qualitative evaluation criterion for measuring the relevance of genome alignments. We used this criterion to compare and benchmark YOC with five recent genome aligners on large bacterial genome datasets, and showed it is suitable for identifying the specificities and the potential flaws of their underlying strategies.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The YOC prototype is available at https://github.com/ruricaru/YOC . It has several advantages over existing genome aligners: (1) it is based on a simplified two phase alignment strategy, (2) it is easy to parameterize, (3) it produces reliable genome alignments, which are easier to analyze and to use.
authors.affiliation: University of Bordeaux, CNRS / LaBRI, F-33405, Talence, France. ruricaru@labri.fr.|University of Bordeaux, CBiB, F-33000, Bordeaux, France. ruricaru@labri.fr.|LIRMM, UMR 5506, Computational Biology Institute, CNRS, University of Montpellier 2, Montpellier, France. ruricaru@labri.fr.
authors.forename: Raluca
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Uricaru
authors.affiliation: MIG, UR 1077, INRA, 78026, Jouy-en-Josas cedex, France. celia.michotey@versailles.inra.fr.
authors.forename: Célia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Michotey
authors.affiliation: MIG, UR 1077, INRA, 78026, Jouy-en-Josas cedex, France. helene.chiapello@toulouse.inra.fr.|MIA-T, UR 0875, INRA, BP 52627, 31326, Castanet-Tolosan cedex, France. helene.chiapello@toulouse.inra.fr.
authors.forename: Hélène
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Chiapello
authors.affiliation: LIRMM, UMR 5506, Computational Biology Institute, CNRS, University of Montpellier 2, Montpellier, France. rivals@lirmm.fr.
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Rivals
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D055028:Comparative Genomic Hybridization; D016680:Genome, Bacterial; D020407:Internet; D013294:Lactococcus lactis / Q000235:genetics; D016415:Sequence Alignment; D014584:User-Computer Interface