Research article
Recurring genomic breaks in independent lineages support genomic fragility
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* Corresponding author: Sridhar Hannenhalli sridharh@pcbi.upenn.edu
1 Penn Center for Bioinformatics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA
2 Department of Genetics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA
BMC Evolutionary Biology 2006, 6:90 doi:10.1186/1471-2148-6-90
Published: 7 November 2006Abstract
Background
Recent findings indicate that evolutionary breaks in the genome are not randomly distributed, and that certain regions, so-called fragile regions, are predisposed to breakages. Previous approaches to the study of genomic fragility have examined the distribution of breaks, as well as the coincidence of breaks with segmental duplications and repeats, within a single species. In contrast, we investigate whether this regional fragility is an inherent genomic characteristic and is thus conserved over multiple independent lineages.
Results
We do this by quantifying the extent to which certain genomic regions are disrupted repeatedly in independent lineages. Our investigation, based on Human, Chimp, Mouse, Rat, Dog and Chicken, suggests that the propensity of a chromosomal region to break is significantly correlated among independent lineages, even when covariates are considered. Furthermore, the fragile regions are enriched for segmental duplications.
Conclusion
Based on a novel methodology, our work provides additional support for the existence of fragile regions.