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Background: It has recently been shown that fractionation, the random loss of excess gene copies after a whole genome duplication event, is a major cause of gene order disruption. When estimating evolutionary distances between genomes based on chromosomal rearrangement, fractionation inevitably leads to significant overestimation of classic rearrangement distances. This bias can be largely avoided when genomes are preprocessed by "consolidation", a procedure that identifies and accounts for regions of fractionation. Results: In this paper, we present a new consolidation algorithm that extends and improves previous work in several directions. We extend the notion of the fractionation region to use information provided by regions where this process is still ongoing. The new algorithm can optionally work with this new definition of fractionation region and is able to process not only tetraploids but also genomes that have undergone hexaploidization and polyploidization events of higher order. Finally, this algorithm reduces the asymptotic time complexity of consolidation from quadratic to linear dependence on the genome size. The new algorithm is applied both to plant genomes and to simulated data to study the effect of fractionation in ancient hexaploids. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Mancheron, Uricaru and Rivals (Nucleic Acids Res. 39:e101, 2011) recently introduced a new approach in the context of multiple genome comparison that allows to detect regions of strong overlaps in a set of pairwise local alignments between several reference genomes and one target genome. Such overlap regions are an important source of information in genome annotation. Results: In this paper we introduce a series of algorithms that improve over the approach of Mancheron et al., both in terms of computational complexity and in practical runtime. We also extend the problem definition such that overlaps to different reference genomes can be rated differently and regions overlapping only a subset of the reference genomes are detected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]