Why Study Genome Rearrangements?

• Genome rearrangements are useful in studying evolution. Since the operations described above are by far more rare than point mutations, one can track the genome rearrangements through the evolutionary history of the species much further back than regular mutations allow.
• There is a very small chance that reverse mutations will affect the exact same location on the genome, so we have less ambiguity in interpreting the mutations.
• Since the rearrangements affect whole chromosomes, this is a larger scale of data which is more appropriate for studying evolution of species. For example, one can take man and mouse. There are about 80 million years of evolutionary distance between them, but only about 140-150 operations of rearrangments.