Duplicated pseudogenes in the human genome are disabled copies of functioning parent genes. They result from block duplication events occurring throughout evolutionary history. Relatively recent duplications (with sequence similarity≥90% and length≥1 kb) are termed segmental duplications (SDs); here, we analyze the interrelationship of SDs and pseudogenes. We present a decision-tree approach to...

Textual analysis of typical microbial genomes reveals that they have the statistical characteristics of a DNA sequence of a much shorter length. This peculiar property supports an evolutionary model in which a genome evolves by random mutation but primarily grows by random segmental duplication. That genomes grew mostly by duplication is consistent with the observation that repeat sequences in ...

UNLABELLED Dblox and RDblox provide a simple statistical test for duplicated genomic structure; the same programs can also be used to identify putatively duplicated regions. The method focuses on ancient duplication events involving protein-coding genes. AVAILABILITY http://www.biol.sc.edu/~austin/

Primate-specific segmental duplications are considered important in human disease and evolution. The inability to distinguish between allelic and duplication sequence overlap has hampered their characterization as well as assembly and annotation of our genome. We developed a method whereby each public sequence is analyzed at the clone level for overrepresentation within a whole-genome shotgun s...

We analyzed the completed human genome for recent segmental duplications (size > or = 1 kb and sequence similarity > or = 90%). We found that approximately 4% of the genome is covered by duplications and that the extent of segmental duplication varies from 1% to 14% among the 24 chromosomes. Intrachromosomal duplication is more frequent than interchromosomal duplication in 15 chromosomes. The d...

The high level of gene redundancy that characterizes eukaryotic genomes results in part from segmental duplications. Spontaneous duplications of large chromosomal segments have been experimentally demonstrated in yeast. However, the dynamics of inheritance of such structures and their eventual fixation in populations remain largely unsolved. We analyzed the stability of a vast panel of large se...