Analyses of Synteny between Arabidopsis thaliana and Species in the Asteraceae Reveal a Complex Network of Small Syntenic Segments and Major Chromosomal Rearrangements

¹ University of Massachusetts, Boston
² University of California, Davis
³ Indiana University, Bloomington
⁴ University of Georgia, Athens

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: rick.kesseli{at}umb.edu.

Submitted on August 10, 2005
Revised on October 18, 2005
Accepted on 7 June 2006

	Abstract

Comparative genomic studies among highly divergent species have been problematic because reduced gene similarities makes orthologous gene pairs difficult to identify and because colinearity is expected to be low with greater times since divergence from the last common ancestor. Nevertheless, synteny between divergent taxa in several lineages has been detected over short chromosomal segments. We have examined the level of synteny between the model species Arabidopsis thaliana and species in the Compositae, one of the largest and most diverse plant families. While macrosyntenic patterns covering large segments of the chromosomes are not evident, significant levels of local synteny are detected at a fine scale covering segments of a 1 Mb regions of A. thaliana and regions of less than 5 cM in lettuce and sunflower. These syntenic patches are often not however colinear and form a network of regions that have likely evolved by duplications followed by differential gene loss.

Key Words: Comparative Genomics, Compositae, Lettuce, Sunflower

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