Algorithmic approaches for genome rearrangement: a review

Genome rearrangement is a new and important research area that studies the gene orders and the evolution of gene families. With the development of fast sequencing techniques, large-scale DNA molecules are investigated with respect to the relative order of genes in them. Contrary to the traditional alignment approach, genome rearrangements are based on comparison of gene orders. Recently, it became a topic capturing wide attention. In this paper, we cover many kinds of rearrangement events such as reversal, transposition, translocation, fussion, fission, and so on. Different types of distances between genomes or chromosomes are discussed. A variety of mathematic models are included.