Genome rearrangements and duplications

Gene duplication is an important source of variation and novelty in genomes. The biological mechanisms behind these duplications have been studied for many years. Depending on their size, duplications are mainly due to single-gene duplications, segmental duplications, gene transfer, or more amazingly whole-genome duplications that are usually followed by gene deletions.

However, most of the combinatorial rearrangement problems, that consist in finding rearrangement scenarios explaining the evolution of a group of species, become hard to solve when duplications are considered. We will discuss different approaches, models and rearrangement problems on sorting genomes with duplicated gene contents.