RT Journal
A1 Postlethwait, John H.
A1 Woods, Ian G.
A1 Ngo-Hazelett, Phuong
A1 Yan, Yi-Lin
A1 Kelly, Peter D.
A1 Chu, Felicia
A1 Huang, Hui
A1 Hill-Force, Alicia
A1 Talbot, William S.
T1 Zebrafish Comparative Genomics and the Origins of Vertebrate Chromosomes
JF Genome Research 
JO Genome Research 
YR 2000 
FD December 01 
VO 10 
IS 12 
SP 1890 
OP 1902 
DO 10.1101/gr.164800 
UL http://genome.cshlp.org/content/10/12/1890.abstract 
AB To help understand mechanisms of vertebrate genome evolution, we have compared zebrafish and tetrapod gene maps. It has been suggested that translocations are fixed more frequently than inversions in mammals. Gene maps showed that blocks of conserved syntenies between zebrafish and humans were large, but gene orders were frequently inverted and transposed. This shows that intrachromosomal rearrangements have been fixed more frequently than translocations. Duplicated chromosome segments suggest that a genome duplication occurred in ray-fin phylogeny, and comparative studies suggest that this event happened deep in the ancestry of teleost fish. Consideration of duplicate chromosome segments shows that at least 20% of duplicated gene pairs may be retained from this event. Despite genome duplication, zebrafish and humans have about the same number of chromosomes, and zebrafish chromosomes are mosaically orthologous to several human chromosomes. Is this because of an excess of chromosome fissions in the human lineage or an excess of chromosome fusions in the zebrafish lineage? Comparative analysis suggests that an excess of chromosome fissions in the tetrapod lineage may account for chromosome numbers and provides histories for several human chromosomes.