Abstract

The reconstruction of ancestral genome architectures and gene orders from homologies between extant species is a long-standing problem, considered by both cytogeneticists and bioinformaticians. A comparison of the two approaches was recently investigated and discussed in a series of papers, sometimes with diverging points of view regarding the performance of these two approaches. We describe a general methodological framework for reconstructing ancestral genome segments from conserved syntenies in extant genomes. We show that this problem, from a computational point of view, is naturally related to physical mapping of chromosomes and benefits from using combinatorial tools developed in this scope. We develop this framework into a new reconstruction method considering conserved gene clusters with similar gene content, mimicking principles used in most cytogenetic studies, although on a different kind of data. We implement and apply it to datasets of mammalian genomes. We perform intensive theoretical and experimental comparisons with other bioinformatics methods for ancestral genome segments reconstruction. We show that the method that we propose is stable and reliable: it gives convergent results using several kinds of data at different levels of resolution, and all predicted ancestral regions are well supported. The results come eventually very close to cytogenetics studies. It suggests that the comparison of methods for ancestral genome reconstruction should include the algorithmic aspects of the methods as well as the disciplinary differences in data acquisition.