摘要
Evolutionary studies based on large-scale rearrangement operations, as opposed to the traditional approaches on point mutations, have been considered as a promising alternative for inferring the evolutionary history of species. Genome rearrangement problems lead to combinatorial puzzles of finding parsimonious scenarios towards measuring what difference species have and explaining how a species evolves from another. Throughout this chapter, we will focus on the introduction of computing the genomic distance, arising from the effects of a set of rearrangement events, between a pair of genomes. In the end, two experiments on Campanulaceae and Proteobacteria are used to simply show how to exploit the genome rearrangement approach for exposing phylogenetic relationships. © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.