Date/Time
Date(s) - 29/09/2004
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Title: Models and Inferences for Genome Rearrangement

Speaker: Dr. David Sankoff

Institute: Dept of Mathematics
University of Ottawa

Location: ABB 102

Description:

The modeling of chromosomal rearrangement for evolutionary inference has reflected the kinds of biological data available at at each period in the recent past. We trace the development of conserved segment statistics through the mouse linkage/human chromosome assignment data analyzed by Nadeau and Taylor in 1984, through the comparative gene order information on organelles (late 1980’s) and prokaryotes (mid-1990’s), to higher eukaryote genome sequences, whose rearrangements have been studied without prior gene identification, and with the help of combinatorial optimization algorithms for inferring detailed evolutionary scenarios. We focus on several key parameters: total number of events, partition of this number among different kinds of events, size distribution of chromosomal segments mobilized by an event, rate of internal shuffling of a segment or gene cluster, detectability of orthologous clusters.