Comparative study on synteny between yeasts and vertebrates

We studied synteny conservation between 18 yeast species and 13 vertebrate species in order to provide a comparative analysis of the chromosomal plasticity in these 2 phyla. By computing the regions of conserved synteny between all pairwise combinations of species within each group, we show that in vertebrates, the number of conserved synteny blocks exponentially increases along with the divergence between orthologous protein and that concomitantly; the number of genes per block exponentially decreases. The same trends are found in yeasts but only when the mean protein divergence between orthologs remains below 36%. When the average protein divergence exceeds this threshold, the total number of recognizable synteny blocks gradually decreases due to the repeated accumulation of rearrangements. We also show that rearrangement rates are on average 3-fold higher in vertebrates than in yeasts, and are estimated to be of 2 rearrangements/Myr. However, the genome sizes being on average 200 times larger in vertebrates than in yeasts, the normalized rates of chromosome rearrangements (per Mb) are about 50-fold higher in yeast than in vertebrate genomes.