. Analysis of genome rearrangements in molecular biology started in the late 1930's, when Dobzhansky and Sturtevant published a milestone paper presenting a rearrangement scenario with 17 inversions for the species of Drosophila. However, until recently there were no computer science results allowing a biologist to analyze genome rearrangements. The paper describes combinatorial problems motivated by genome rearrangements, surveys recently developed algorithms for genomic sequence comparison and presents applications of these algorithms to analyze rearrangements in herpes viruses, plant organelles, and mammalian chromosomes. 1 Introduction In the late 1980's Jeffrey Palmer and colleagues discovered a remarkable and novel pattern of evolutionary change in plant organelles. They compared the mitochondrial genomes of Brassica oleracea (cabbage) and Brassica campestris (turnip), which are very closely related (many genes are 99% - 99.9% identical). To their surprise, these molecules, whi...

Research article The complete chloroplast genome sequence of the chlorophycean green alga Scenedesmus obliquus reveals a compact gene organization and a biased distribution of genes on the two DNA strands