Overview of conserved synteny in 17 vertebrate genomes.

Each comparison represents an inner node in the phylogenetic tree (Figure 1). In order to remove redundancy we defined representative syntenic blocks (RSBs) as gene order alignments that have a maximum size among all overlapping alignments that might be due to duplications in one of the lineages. From the set of all RSBs, we computed the mean number of syntenic genes per species and size of the spanned genomic regions. The column ‘’ gives a rough estimate on how many blocks may be disrupted due to incomplete genome assemblies. It denotes the number of RSBs, in which one of the genes in the alignment is the last gene of a chromosome or contig.