1389-2029/07 $50.00+.00 ©2007 Bentham Science Publishers Ltd. Patterns of Insertion and Deletion in Mammalian Genomes

Abstract: Nucleotide insertions and deletions (indels) are responsible for gaps in the sequence alignments. Indel is one of the major sources of evolutionary change at the molecular level. We have examined the patterns of insertions and dele-tions in the 19 mammalian genomes, and found that deletion events are more common than insertions in the mammalian genomes. Both the number of insertions and deletions decrease rapidly when the gap length increases and single nucleo-tide indel is the most frequent in all indel events. The frequencies of both insertions and deletions can be described well by power law