Towards a computational theory of genome rearrangements

Analysis of genome rearrangements in molecular biology started in the late 1930's, when Dobzhansky and Sturtevant published a milestone paper presenting a rearrangement scenario with 17 inversions for the species of Drosophila. However, until recently there were no computer science results allowing a biologist to analyze genome rearrangements. The paper describes combinatorial problems motivated by genome rearrangements, surveys recently developed algorithms for genomic sequence comparison and presents applications of these algorithms to analyze rearrangements in herpes viruses, plant organelles, and mammalian chromosomes.