Meeting Abstract

P1.9  Monday, Jan. 4  Testing for the action of selection on genome rearrangement dynamics deep in the metazoan tree. PUTNAM, Nicholas H; Rice University nputnam@rice.edu

Recent genome sequencing efforts have dramatically expanded the sampling of metazoan diversity represented among sequenced genomes. One unexpected result yielded by comparisons among these genomes is that large-scale organization of the genome is conserved from the eumetazoan ancestor in representatives of at least five metazoan phyla, while it appears to have been lost in other genomes. This conservation allows the reconstruction of chromosomal gene complements for very ancient animal ancestors, and reveal specific events of genome rearrangement along ancestral lineages. These reconstructions can be used to constrain the parameters of models of genome evolution. A still unresolved question is whether the observed conservation is the result of selection acting to preserve functional features of genome organization, or of slow neutral decay of the ancestral genome organization. I will present progress in testing neutral and non-neutral models against the data.