Dependence of paracentric inversion rate on tract length
Thomas L York, Rick Durrett, and Rasmus Nielsen
Abstract. We develop a Bayesian method based on MCMC for estimating the
relative rates of pericentric and paracentric inversions from
marker data from two species. The method also allows estimation
of the distribution of inversion tract lengths.
We apply the method to data from Drosophila melanogaster and D. yakuba
We find that pericentric inversions occur at a much
lower rate compared to paracentric inversions.
The average paracentric inversion tract length is approx. 4.8 Mb
with small inversions being more frequent than large inversions.
If the two breakpoints defining a paracentric inversion tract
are uniformly and independently distributed over chromosome arms
there will be more short tract-length inversions than long; we find
an even greater preponderance of short tract lengths than this would predict.
Thus there appears to be a correlation between the positions
of breakpoints which favors shorter tract lengths.
The method developed in this paper provides the first
statistical estimator for estimating the distribution of inversion
tract lengths from marker data. Application of this method for a
number of data sets may help elucidate the relationship between
the length of an inversion and the chance that it will get
accepted.
Preprint (pdf file) of paper to appear in
BioMedCentral Bioinformatics
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