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Updated: Jul 18, 2026

Following the Dynamics of Structural Variants in Experimentally Evolved Populations
Published on: February 3, 2023
Microinversions in mammalian evolution
M J Chaisson1, B J Raphael, P A Pevzner
1Bioinformatics Program and Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA. mchaisso@bioinf.ucsd.edu
Abstract:
We propose an approach for identifying microinversions across different species and show that microinversions provide a source of low-homoplasy evolutionary characters. These characters may be used as "certificates" to verify different branches in a phylogenetic tree, turning the challenging problem of phylogeny reconstruction into a relatively simple algorithmic problem. We estimate that there exist hundreds of thousands of microinversions in genomes of mammals from comparative sequencing projects, an untapped source of new phylogenetic characters.
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