Section: Application Domains

Genome structures

Our third application domain is concerned with the structural organization of genomes. Genome rearrangements are able to change genome architecture by modifying the order of genes or genomic fragments. The first studies were based onto linkage maps and mathematical models appeared fifteen years ago. But the usage of computational tools was still limited because of lack of data. The increasing availability of complete and partial genomes now offers an unprecedented opportunity to analyse genome rearrangements in a systematic way and gives rise to a wide spectrum of problems: Taking into account several kinds of evolutionary events, looking for evolutionary paths conserving common structure of genomes, dealing with duplicated content, being able to analyse large sets of genomes even at the intraspecific level, computing ancestral genomes and paths transforming these genomes into several descendant genomes.