A Taste of Yeast Mobilomics.

Mobilomics calls for detecting all the mobile elements in a genome so as to understand their dynamic behavior. We devise and apply a method that extends a pairwise strain comparison tool for mobile genetic elements (MGE) inference, and perform experiments on a whole dataset of 39 complete genomes of as many yeast ( S. cerevisiae) strains. We locate a priori all the MGEs regions that are annotated in the reference sequence at hand, and map all the putative MGEs in all the other (non-annotated) strains. Interestingly, evolutionary relation among the strains based on the presence/absence of candidate MGEs, turns out to be quite close to that inferred by classic phylogenetic methods based on SNPs analysis.