Rearranjo de genomas: uma coletanea de artigos

Nowadays, a huge amount of genetic information is publicly available. Genomic’s current challenge is to process this information in order to obtain relevant biological conclusions. One possible way of structuring this information is through genome comparison, where we seek similarities and differences among the genomes of two or more organisms. In this context, the area of Genome Rearrangements has received considerable attention lately. One way of comparing genomes is given by the rearrangement distance, which is determined by the minimum number of rearrangement events that explain the differences between two genomes. The main studies in rearrangement distance involve reversal and transposition events. The present collection is composed of eight articles, containing several important results on Genome Rearrangements. These papers were presented in six conferences, one with Brazilian scope and five with international scope. Two of these works will be published in important international journals, and one other work appeared as a book chapter. Our main contributions can be divided into two groups: a new algebraic formalism and a series of results involving the transposition event. The new algebraic theory relates the genome rearrangement theory to the theory of permutation groups. Our intention was to establish an algebraic formalism that simplifies the creation of new results, up to now excessively based on the construction of diagrams. We studied the transposition event in several ways. Besides presenting results on the transpositions distance between a permutation and its inverse, we also studied the rearrangement problem involving transpositions and reversals simultaneously, constructing approximation algorithms and proposing a conjecture on the diameter. We used the algebraic formalism to show that it is possible to determine the distance of fusion, fission, and transposition in polynomial time. This is the first polynomial time result for a rearrangement problem involving the transposition event. Finally, we introduced two now rearrangement problems: the syntenic distance problem involving fission and fusion, and the prefix transposition problem. For each one of these problems we present significant results, widening the knowledge in this area.