From Biological Problems to Combinatorial Algorithms (and back)

An important question in genome evolution is whether there exist fragile regions (rearrangement hotspots) where chromosomal rearrangements are happening over and over again. We demonstrate that fragile regions are subject to a “birth and death” process, implying that fragility has limited evolutionary lifespan. This finding implies that fragile regions migrate to different locations in different mammals, explaining why there exists relatively few chromosomal breakpoints shared between distant branches of the evolutionary tree. The birth and death of fragile regions phenomenon reinforces the hypothesis that rearrangements are promoted by matching segmental duplications and suggests putative locations of the currently active fragile regions in the human genome.
This is a joint work with Max Alekseyev at University of South Carolina.