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Homoplastic Microinversions And The Avian Tree Of Life, Edward L. Braun, Rebecca T. Kimball, Kin-Lan Han, Naomi R. Iuhasz-Velez, Amber J. Bonilla, Jena L. Chojnowski, Jordan V. Smith, Rauri Ck Bowie, Michael J. Braun, Shannon J. Hackett, John Harshman, Christopher J. Huddleston, Ben D. Marks, Kathleen J. Miglia, William S. Moore, Sushma Reddy, Frederick H. Sheldon, Christopher C. Witt, Tamaki Yuri

Wayne State University Associated BioMed Central Scholarship

Abstract

Background

Microinversions are cytologically undetectable inversions of DNA sequences that accumulate slowly in genomes. Like many other rare genomic changes (RGCs), microinversions are thought to be virtually homoplasy-free evolutionary characters, suggesting that they may be very useful for difficult phylogenetic problems such as the avian tree of life. However, few detailed surveys of these genomic rearrangements have been conducted, making it difficult to assess this hypothesis or understand the impact of microinversions upon genome evolution.

Results

We surveyed non-coding sequence data from a recent avian phylogenetic study and found substantially more microinversions than expected based upon prior information about …