Yeast Ancestral Genome Reconstructions: The Possibilities of Computational Methods

Abstract

In 2006, a debate has risen on the question of the efficiency of bioinformatics methods to reconstruct mammalian ancestral genomes. Three years later, Gordon et al. (PLoS Genetics, 5(5), 2009) chose not to use automatic methods to build up the genome of a 100 million year old Saccharomyces cerevisiae ancestor. Their manually constructed ancestor provides a reference genome to test whether automatic methods are indeed unable to approach confident reconstructions. Adapting several methodological frameworks to the same yeast gene order data, I discuss the possibilities, differences and similarities of the available algorithms for ancestral genome reconstructions. The methods can be classified into two types: local and global. Studying the properties of both helps to clarify what we can expect from their usage. Both methods propose contiguous ancestral regions that come very close (> 95% identity) to the manually predicted ancestral yeast chromosomes, with a good coverage of the extant genomes.