Research article Dependence of paracentric inversion rate on tract length.pdf

BMC Bioinformatics BioMed Central Research article Open Access Dependence of paracentric inversion rate on tract length 1 2 1,3 Thomas L York* , Rick Durrett and Rasmus Nielsen Address: 1Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA, 2Department of Mathematics, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA and 3Center for Bioinformatics, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark Email: Thomas L York* - tly2@; Rick Durrett - rtd1@; Rasmus Nielsen - rasmus@binf.ku.dk * Corresponding author Published: 3 April 2007 Received: 18 January 2007 Accepted: 3 April 2007 BMC Bioinformatics 2007, 8:115 doi:10.1186/1471-2105-8-115 This article is available from: /1471-2105/8/115 © 2007 York et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: 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. Results: We apply the method to data from Drosophila melanogaster and D. yakuba. We find that pericentric inversions occur at a much lower rate co