Section: New Results

Spatial synteny in Eukaryotes

Folding and intermingling of chromosomes has the potential of bringing close to each other loci that are very distant genomically or even on different chromosomes. On the other hand, genomic rearrangements also play a major role in the reorganisation of loci proximities. Whether the same loci are involved in both mechanisms has been studied in the case of somatic rearrangements, but never from an evolutionary standpoint. From the joint study of the network of spatial proximities of human genomic loci and a dataset of evolutionary breakpoints between human and mouse, we were able to provide evidence that evolutionary breakpoints tended to cluster spatially in human cells, which led us to propose the new notion of spatial synteny, which generalises the concept of genomic synteny. This work was submitted in 2010 and was accepted in 2011 [24] . It was done in collaboration with C. Lemaitre.