Revisiting the landscape of evolutionary breakpoints across human genome using multi-way comparison

Genome rearrangement is one of the major forces driving the processes of the evolution and disease development. The chromosomal position affected by these rearrangements are called breakpoints. The breakpoints occurring during the evolution of species are known to be non randomly distributed. Detecting their landscape and mapping them to genomic features constitute an important features in both comparative and functional genomics. Several studies have attempted to provide such mapping based on pairwise comparison of genes as conservation anchors. With the availability of more accurate multi-way alignments, we design an approach to identify synteny blocks and evolutionary breakpoints based on UCSC 45-way conservation sequence alignments with 12 selected species. The multi-way designed approach with the mild flexibility of presence of selected species, helped to have a better determination of human lineage-specific evolutionary breakpoints. We identified 261,391 human lineage-specific evolutionary breakpoints across the genome and 2,564 dense regions enriched with biological processes involved in adaptive traits such as response to DNA damage stimulus, cellular response to stress and metabolic process. Moreover, we found 230 regions refractory to evolutionary breakpoints that carry genes associated with crucial developmental process such as organ morphogenesis, skeletal system development, chordate embryonic development, nerve development and regulation of biological process. This initial map of the human genome will help to gain better insight into several studies including developmental studies and cancer rearrangement processes.