¹Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, K1N 6N5, Canada
²Department of Biology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, K1N 6N5, Canada
³D'e}partement d'informatique et de recherche op'e}rationnelle, Universit'e} de Montr'e}al, H3C 3J7, Canada
⁴School of Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, K1N 6N5, Canada
⁵Biology Department, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, U.S.A.
⁶Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Falls Church, VA 22043, U.S.A.
⁷Department of Biochemistry, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, K1N 6N5, Canada
⁸Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, U.S.A.

As genomes evolve over hundreds of millions years, the chromosomes become rearranged, with segments of some chromosomes inverted, while other chromosomes reciprocally exchange chunks from their ends. These rearrangements lead to the scrambling of the elements of one genome with respect to another descended from a common ancestor. Multidisciplinary work undertakes to mathematically model these processes and to develop statistical analyses and mathematical algorithms to understand the scrambling in the chromosomes of two or more related genomes. A major focus is the reconstruction of the gene order of the ancestral genomes.

This work was supported in part by grants and fellowships from the Natural Science and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC).