Genome rearrangement

Genomes evolve by chromosomal fissions and fusions, reciprocal translocations between chromosomes, and inversions that change gene order within chromosomes. For more than a decade biologists and computer scientists have studied these processes by parsimony methods, i.e., what is the minimum number of events needed to turn one genome into another? We have recently begun to develop a stochastic approach to this and related questions, which has the advantage of producing confidence intervals for estimates and allowing tests of hypotheses concerning mechanisms.