Microinversions in mammalian evolution

Abstract

We propose an approach for identifying microinversions across different species and show that microinversions provide a source of low-homoplasy evolutionary characters. These characters may be used as “certificates” to verify different branches in a phylogenetic tree, turning the challenging problem of phylogeny reconstruction into a relatively simple algorithmic problem. We estimate that there exist hundreds of thousands of microinversions in genomes of mammals from comparative sequencing projects, an untapped source of new phylogenetic characters.