Importance of the rearrangement rates on the organization of transcription.

International audienceThe organization of genomes shows striking differences among the different life forms. These differences come along with important variations in the way genomes are transcribed, operon structures being frequent in short genomes and the exception in large ones, while ncRNAs are frequent in large genomes but rare in short ones. Here, we use the digital genetics model "aevol" to explore the influence of the mutation rates on these structures, showing that their diversity can be accurately reproduced when varying the rearrangement rate. This result points us to the mutational burden hypothesis as one of the main explanation. In this view, a specific level of mutational robustness indirectly leads to genome and transcriptome streamlining