Description

This track shows alignments of C. elegans (ce6, May 2008 (WS190/ce6)) to the C. remanei genome using a gap scoring system that allows longer gaps than traditional affine gap scoring systems. It can also tolerate gaps in both C. elegans and C. remanei simultaneously. These "double-sided" gaps can be caused by local inversions and overlapping deletions in both species.

The chain track displays boxes joined together by either single or double lines. The boxes represent aligning regions. Single lines indicate gaps that are largely due to a deletion in the C. elegans assembly or an insertion in the C. remanei assembly. Double lines represent more complex gaps that involve substantial sequence in both species. This may result from inversions, overlapping deletions, an abundance of local mutation, or an unsequenced gap in one species. In cases where multiple chains align over a particular region of the C. remanei genome, the chains with single-lined gaps are often due to processed pseudogenes, while chains with double-lined gaps are more often due to paralogs and unprocessed pseudogenes.

In the "pack" and "full" display modes, the individual feature names indicate the chromosome, strand, and location (in thousands) of the match for each matching alignment.

Display Conventions and Configuration

By default, the chains to chromosome-based assemblies are colored based on which chromosome they map to in the aligning organism. To turn off the coloring, check the "off" button next to: Color track based on chromosome.

To display only the chains of one chromosome in the aligning organism, enter the name of that chromosome (e.g. chr4) in box next to: Filter by chromosome.

Methods

Transposons that have been inserted since the C. elegans/C. remanei split were removed from the assemblies. The abbreviated genomes were aligned with blastz using dynamic masking, and the transposons were then added back in. The resulting alignments were converted into psl format using the lavToPsl program. The axt alignments were fed into axtChain, which organizes all alignments between a single C. elegans chromosome and a single C. remanei chromosome into a group and creates a kd-tree out of the gapless subsections (blocks) of the alignments. A dynamic program was then run over the kd-trees to find the maximally scoring chains of these blocks. The following matrix was used:

	A	C	G	T
A	91	-114	-31	-123
C	-114	100	-125	-31
G	-31	-125	100	-114
T	-123	-31	-114	91

Credits

Blastz was developed at Pennsylvania State University by Minmei Hou, Scott Schwartz, Zheng Zhang, and Webb Miller with advice from Ross Hardison.

Repeat areas we marked in the genome with WindowMasker as developed by: Morgulis A, Gertz EM, Schäffer AA, Agarwala R.

The axtChain program was developed at the University of California at Santa Cruz by Jim Kent with advice from Webb Miller and David Haussler.

The browser display and database storage of the chains were generated by Robert Baertsch and Jim Kent.

References

Chiaromonte F, Yap VB, Miller W. Scoring pairwise genomic sequence alignments. Pac Symp Biocomput. 2002:115-26. PMID: 11928468

Kent WJ, Baertsch R, Hinrichs A, Miller W, Haussler D. Evolution's cauldron: Duplication, deletion, and rearrangement in the mouse and human genomes. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2003 Sep 30;100(20):11484-9. PMID: 14500911; PMC: PMC208784

Morgulis A, Gertz EM, Schäffer AA, Agarwala R. WindowMasker: window-based masker for sequenced genomes. Bioinformatics. 2006 Jan 15;22(2):134-41. PMID: 16287941

Schwartz S, Kent WJ, Smit A, Zhang Z, Baertsch R, Hardison R, Haussler D, Miller W. Human-Mouse Alignments with BLASTZ. Genome Res. 2003 Jan;13(1):103-7. PMID: 12529312; PMC: PMC430961