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In groups of species where major changes of gene order happened but genes tended to stay on the same chromosome, a marked feature is that the strand on which homologous sequences align appears to be randomised. This index expresses it with a number.

Usage

strand_randomisation_index(gb, tiles = NULL)

Arguments

gb

A GBreaks object.

tiles

A number of tiles

Value

Returns a numeric value between 0 and 1.

Details

For each feature in the target genome, the total length of alignments on the plus strand is subtracted from that on the minus strand, and the absolute value is taken (because there is no guarantee that homologous chromosomes are sequenced in the same direction in different assemblies). This value is normalized by the total number of aligned bases. A weighted mean is then computed across all features, using each feature’s total aligned bases as its weight. Thus, a number close to 1 is expected for closely related genomes.

Note

This index is designed for comparison of chromosomal assemblies that have a strong conservation of synteny in the sense most homologous genes are mapped on pairs of homologous chromosomes. In 2025, a new tiles option was added to make the index more robust to assembly errors and karyotype changes.

References

Plessy C, Mansfield MJ, Bliznina A, Masunaga A, West C, Tan Y, Liu AW, Grašič J, Del Río Pisula MS, Sánchez-Serna G, Fabrega-Torrus M, Ferrández-Roldán A, Roncalli V, Navratilova P, Thompson EM, Onuma T, Nishida H, Cañestro C, Luscombe NM (2024). Extreme genome scrambling in marine planktonic Oikopleura dioica cryptic species. Genome Research, 34(3), 426–440. https://doi.org/10.1101/gr.278295.123. PMID: 38621828

Author

Charles Plessy

Examples

strand_randomisation_index(exampleInversion)
#> [1] 0.3992674