Strategies and tools for whole-genome alignments

The availability of the assembled mouse genome makes possible, for tile first time, all alignment and comparison of two large vertebrate genomes. We investigated different strategies of alignment for tile subsequent analysis of conservation of genomes that are effective for assemblies of different quality. These strategies were applied to the comparison of the working draft of tile human genome with tile Mouse Genome Sequencing Consortium assembly, as well as other intermediate mouse assemblies. Our methods are fast and the resulting alignments exhibit a high degree of sensitivity, covering more than 90% of known coding exons in the human genome. We obtained such coverage while preserving specificity. With a view towards tile end user, we developed a suite of tools and Web sites for automatically aligning and subsequently browsing and working with whole-genome comparisons. We describe the use of these tools to identify conserved non-coding regions between tile human and mouse genomes, some of which have not been identified by other methods.