Multi-break Rearrangements: From Circular to Linear Genomes

Multi-break rearrangements break a genome into multiple fragments and further glue them together in a new order. While 2break rearrangements represent standard reversals, fusions, fissions, and translocations operations; 3-break rearrangements are a natural generalization of transpositions and inverted transpositions. Multi-break rearrangements in circular genomes were studied in depth in [1] and were further applied to the analysis of chromosomal evolution in mammalian genomes [2]. In this paper we extend these results to the more difficult case of linear genomes. In particular, we give lower bounds for the rearrangement distance between linear genomes and use these results to analyze comparative genomic architecture of mammalian genomes.