Drillon G, Fischer G.

C R Biol. 2011 Aug-Sep;334(8-9):629-38. doi:10.1016/j.crvi.2011.05.011

Comparative study on synteny between yeasts and vertebrates.

“Synteny blocks were defined as series of neighboring pairs of orthologs separated by less than 5 nonneighboring reciprocal best-hits in the two compared genomes.” “In vertebrates, the number of synteny blocks increases exponentially with increasing divergence time, varying from a very small number of blocks, 43 between human and chimpanzee, to more than 1900 blocks between dog and zebrafish.” “In yeasts, the number of synteny blocks is more restrained, varying from 26 between Candida albicans and C. dubliniensis up to 744 between Debaryomyces hansenii and Pichia pastoris. The number of blocks also exponentially increases along with protein divergence but only between 8 and 36% of divergence. At increasing phylogenetic distances, the number of synteny blocks decreases.” “For both yeast and vertebrate, the average number of shared orthologs per synteny block decreases exponentially with increasing evolutionary distance”