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Comparative Genomics of Brassica oleracea and Arabidopsis thaliana Reveal Gene Loss, Fragmentation, and Dispersal after Polyploidy^[W],[OA]

^a The Institute for Genomic Research, Rockville, Maryland 20850
^b John Innes Centre, Colney, Norwich NR4 7UH, United Kingdom

¹ To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail ian.bancroft{at}bbsrc.ac.uk; fax 44-1603-450021.

	ABSTRACT

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION RESULTS DISCUSSION METHODS REFERENCES

 
We sequenced 2.2 Mb representing triplicated genome segments of Brassica oleracea, which are each paralogous with one another and homologous with a segmentally duplicated region of the Arabidopsis thaliana genome. Sequence annotation identified 177 conserved collinear genes in the B. oleracea genome segments. Analysis of synonymous base substitution rates indicated that the triplicated Brassica genome segments diverged from a common ancestor soon after divergence of the Arabidopsis and Brassica lineages. This conclusion was corroborated by phylogenetic analysis of protein families. Using A. thaliana as an outgroup, 35% of the genes inferred to be present when genome triplication occurred in the Brassica lineage have been lost, most likely via a deletion mechanism, in an interspersed pattern. Genes encoding proteins involved in signal transduction or transcription were not found to be significantly more extensively retained than those encoding proteins classified with other functions, but putative proteins predicted in the A. thaliana genome were underrepresented in B. oleracea. We identified one example of gene loss from the Arabidopsis lineage. We found evidence for the frequent insertion of gene fragments of nuclear genomic origin and identified four apparently intact genes in noncollinear positions in the B. oleracea and A. thaliana genomes.

	INTRODUCTION

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION RESULTS DISCUSSION METHODS REFERENCES

 
Polyploidy has occurred extensively in angiosperms (Leitch and Bennett, 1997) and is recognized as a key factor in the evolution of plants and their genomes (Wendel, 2000). Even the exceptionally small genome of the model species Arabidopsis thaliana has a polyploid origin, although there has been extensive rearrangement and loss of genes from the duplicated genome segments (Arabidopsis Genome Initiative, 2000; Blanc et al., 2000; Ku et al., 2000; Mayer et al., 2001). Thus, we regard genome evolution in plants as occurring by a cyclical process of polyploidy followed by diploidization, by which stable meiosis is restored (a rapid process) and the gene number reduces toward that of the diploid ancestor (a slow process). Understanding the mechanisms involved in the structural and functional evolution of genomes during this cycle is of major importance to plant biology. As well as helping to understand the processes that differentiate the genomes of closely related species, it may help us identify and understand the limited conservation of genome microstructure that can be detected between distantly related species, such as A. thaliana and tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) (Ku et al., 2000) or rice (Oryza sativa) (Mayer et al., 2001), the lineages of which diverged from that of A. thaliana 150 and 200 million years ago (MYA), respectively (Wolfe et al., 1989; Yang et al., 1999).

The Brassiceae tribe is a monophyletic group within the Brassicaceae family (Cruciferae) (Warwick and Black, 1997). It includes the cultivated Brassica species, which are the group of crops most closely related to A. thaliana. The Brassica and Arabidopsis lineages diverged 20 MYA (Yang et al., 1999). Phylogenetic analysis groups the Brassica species into the nigra and rapa/oleracea lineages (Warwick and Black, 1991), which diverged 8 MYA (Lysak et al., 2005). Early comparative studies conducted at the level of genetic linkage maps revealed extensive duplication within Brassica genomes (Lagercrantz and Lydiate, 1996) and tracts of collinearity disrupted by multiple rearrangements between the genomes of B. nigra and A. thaliana (Lagercrantz, 1998). Subsequent comparative analyses between B. oleracea linkage maps and the A. thaliana genome identified numerous one-to-one segmental relationships and apparent genome duplications, in addition to genome triplications (Lan et al., 2000; Babula et al., 2003; Lukens et al., 2003). Investigations of regions of the genome of B. oleracea containing specific genes of interest also revealed various numbers of related genome segments (Quiros et al., 2001; Suzuki et al., 2003). Sequence analysis of a region of the B. oleracea genome containing a family of oxoglutarate-dependent dioxygenase genes revealed extensive rearrangement compared with the homologous region of the genome of A. thaliana (Gao et al., 2004). However, the high frequency of rearrangements within tandem arrays of genes (Michelmore and Meyers, 1998; Noel et al., 1999) means that such a region is unlikely to be representative of the evolution of the genome as a whole.

A number of alternative hypotheses have been developed to explain how Brassica genome structure evolved, including an ancient tetraploidy and/or numerous segmental duplications (Lukens et al., 2004). The most likely, however, is that the diploid Brassica species, including B. oleracea, are paleohexaploids. Although there was already strong evidence for this hypothesis (Schmidt et al., 2001; Parkin et al., 2003), decisive support came in 2005 from two reports. In the first, an 8.7-Mb BAC contig of the A. thaliana genome was used to trace homologous chromosome regions in 21 species of the family Brassicaceae (Lysak et al., 2005). The results revealed that a distinctive feature of Brassiceae tribe species is that they contain triplicated genomes, indicative of being derived from a hexaploid ancestor with basic genomes similar to that of A. thaliana. In the second report, a genome-wide analysis was conducted using a linkage map of B. napus (a recent allotetraploid, formed by hybridization of B. oleracea and B. rapa) that consisted of >1000 linked restriction fragment length polymorphism loci that were mapped to homologous positions in the A. thaliana genome based on sequence similarity (Parkin et al., 2005). Twenty-one segments of the genome of A. thaliana, representing almost its entirety, could be duplicated and rearranged to generate the structure of the B. napus genome. The majority of the A. thaliana genome (11 segments) could be aligned to six segments of the B. napus genome, indicative of triplication in the genomes of both progenitor species. However, three segments of the A. thaliana genome aligned to seven segments of the B. napus genome, indicative of additional segmental duplications, and five segments of the A. thaliana genome aligned to only four or five segments of the B. napus genome, indicative of segmental loss from the hexaploid.

The results of comparative studies of genome microstructure, using physical mapping techniques, in targeted regions of the genomes of B. oleracea, B. rapa, and B. napus, relative to the genome of A. thaliana, are consistent with the fundamentally triplicated nature of the diploid Brassica genome (O'Neill and Bancroft, 2000; Rana et al., 2004; Park et al., 2005). Three paralogous segments were identified in each Brassica genome. Although synteny of genes within these collinear segments was found to be largely well conserved, there was evidence of extensive gene loss, which occurred in an interspersed pattern. The results also showed that the genomes analyzed could be differentiated by a few differences in gene content and small-scale rearrangements.

Brassica polyploids can be readily synthesized artificially and display genome instability that has been interpreted as indicating that a high rate of genome evolution occurs in polyploids (Song et al., 1995). However, natural Brassica polyploids appear to show relatively little change in genome structure compared with their progenitor species at the level of either macrostructure (Parkin et al., 1995) or microstructure (Rana et al., 2004). We aimed to characterize, at the sequence level, the consequences of the naturally occurring polyploidy observed in B. oleracea and to interpret the observations in relation to potential mechanisms of plant genome evolution. To do this, we analyzed a related set of segments of the genome of B. oleracea that have been analyzed previously by physical mapping techniques (O'Neill and Bancroft, 2000). These correspond to two sets of paralogous segments, one set being homologous with a segment of the A. thaliana genome on chromosome 4 and the other set being homologous with a segment of the A. thaliana genome on chromosome 5. These two regions of the A. thaliana genome are related by duplication (Bancroft, 2000), corresponding to the last, or , whole genome duplication (Bowers et al., 2003), and provide outgroups for the analysis of the triplicated segments within the B. oleracea genome. Because we have complete sets of sequence data in some regions, we can also use an amalgamation of the genes present in the B. oleracea sequences as an outgroup, enabling us to detect evolutionary events affecting the duplicated segments within the corresponding parts of the A. thaliana genome. As the nigra and rapa/oleracea lineages of Brassica species diverged substantially more recently than when the genome triplication that characterizes the (monophyletic) Brassiceae tribe occurred (Lysak et al., 2005), we refer to the lineage leading to B. oleracea as the Brassica lineage, because the principal findings (i.e., those relating to the consequences of genome triplication) are expected to be common to all Brassica species.

	RESULTS

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION RESULTS DISCUSSION METHODS REFERENCES

 
Generation of Brassica Sequence Contigs
A seed BAC, located approximately in the middle of each of the seven BAC contigs described by O'Neill and Bancroft (2000), was chosen for sequencing. In addition, all clones in the seven BAC contigs they reported were end-sequenced. Upon completion of the sequencing of each seed BAC, BAC end sequence data were used to determine the overlapping BAC that would produce the maximum amount of additional sequence. In some cases, BAC end sequence data were ambiguous and BACs were fingerprinted to minimize the possibility of choosing a BAC from the wrong contig. Most BACs were sequenced to GenBank phase 3 finished standards, although there were some unsequenceable regions. After the completion of sequencing, the BACs from each contig were assembled to produce a single sequence assembly, as summarized in Table 1 . In all cases, these assemblies showed that the original assignment of the BACs to their respective contigs on the basis of physical mapping techniques was correct.

View larger version (18K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 1. Phylogenetic Relationships of Conserved Genes. Left, overview of the positions of the members of the analyzed gene family across the sequence contigs. Right, phylogenies illustrated as maximum likelihood cladograms. Bootstrap support, calculated from 1000 replicates, is shown at each branch as a percentage.

Gene Loss
In total, 177 of the genes identified in the B. oleracea sequences correspond to collinear homologues of genes in the Arabidopsis genome segments, as summarized schematically in Figure 2 . These genes represent 66% of the 271 genes inferred to be present in these genome segments upon genome triplication (i.e., the sum of the number of genes in the corresponding segments of the A. thaliana genome). There is only one exception to conservation of synteny and strand orientation: the order of the homologues in contig A of At5g47090 and At5g47080 (i.e., A.m00604 and A.m00600) is reversed. As the strand orientation of At5g47090 and A.m00600 is conserved, whereas that of At5g17080 and A.m000604 is reversed, the rearrangement appears to have involved the translocation and inversion of the ancestor of At5g47080 or A.m00604 in one lineage.

View larger version (44K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 2. Alignment of Conserved Genes. Vertical lines denote sequence contigs, and horizontal lines join members of homologous/paralogous gene families. The triangle by each gene model name indicates the coding stand of the gene and is color-coded to indicate the Munich Information Center for Protein Sequences FunCat functional classification of the predicted protein, as shown in the key at bottom.

Previous studies have indicated that genes involved in signal transduction and transcription may be preferentially retained after duplication (Blanc and Wolfe, 2004). We classified the conserved genes using the Munich Information Center for Protein Sequences functional category of the proteins (FunCat) that they are predicted to encode, as indicated in Figure 2. Collectively, the A. thaliana chromosome 4 and 5 segments contain 175 gene models. For the 29 classified as cellular communication/signal transduction or transcription, there are 38 orthologues in the B. oleracea sequences, and for the 43 classified with other functions, there are 50 orthologues in the B. oleracea sequences. These proportions do not differ from the null hypothesis of equal retention irrespective of functional classification (² = 0.32). The only underrepresented category was that described by FunCat as putative proteins, which correspond to a subset of the proteins annotated as hypothetical protein by The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) pipeline. For the 28 classified as putative proteins in A. thaliana, there are 18 orthologues in B. oleracea (² = 4.46, P < 0.05).

We can identify one example of gene loss having occurred from the A. thaliana lineage. Genes A.m00038 and B.m00021 are orthologous with At5g47390. They are also closely related to genes D.m00014 and F.m00060, which occur in collinear positions in the B. oleracea contigs related to the A. thaliana chromosome 4 segment. However, there is no homologue in the corresponding position in the A. thaliana genome (or anywhere else in the genome). The occurrence of homologous genes in two A. thaliana chromosome 4–related B. oleracea contigs (D and F), and in the corresponding A. thaliana chromosome 5 segments, indicates that there was a copy of the gene, between the ancestors of At4g17430 and At4g17440, at the time of divergence of the Arabidopsis and Brassica lineages that has subsequently been lost from the Arabidopsis lineage.

Analysis of Tandem Arrays
One of the unexpected features of plant genome structure is the frequent occurrence of tandem arrays of genes. The Brassica sequence contigs contain numerous examples of tandem arrays. In four cases, these represent amplification of genes present in single copy per locus in A. thaliana. These were D.m00041/D.m00042 related to At4g17720, D.m0087/D.m0088 related to At4g17790, G.m00350/G.m00351/G.m00352 related to At4g17850, and C.m00009/C.m00010 related to At5g47560. The A. thaliana chromosome 4 and chromosome 5 segments contain one common duplicate array (At4g17490/At4g17500 related to At5g47220/At5g47230) and one common triplicate array (At4g17470/At4g17480/At4g17483 related to At5g47330/At5g47340/At5g47350). The representation of these gene families is generally reduced in the B. oleracea genome segments, as shown in Figure 2. However, we can use the sequences of the protein families to identify orthology relationships and to assess how stable the arrays observed in A. thaliana might be. We constructed phylogenies for the protein families encoded by these sets of genes. Phylogenetic analysis of the protein family related to the tandem duplication resulted in consistent trees using both neighbor-joining and maximum likelihood methods, as illustrated in Figure 3 . The alignments are shown in Supplemental Figure 3 online. The results show that B. oleracea genes B.m00034 and C.m00062 are orthologous with At5g47230, A.m00057 and B.m00042 are orthologous with At5g47220, E.m00030 is orthologous with At4g17490, and the sequenced regions contain no orthologue of At4g17500. The phylogeny also indicates that the tandem duplication is of ancient origin, predating the genome duplication. Phylogenetic analyses were conducted for the protein family related to the tandem triplication. Part of the tree was consistently constructed using either the neighbor-joining or maximum likelihood method, as illustrated in Figure 4 . The alignments are shown in Supplemental Figure 4 online. The results show that B. oleracea genes D.m00019 and E.m00589 are orthologous with At4g17483, F.m00071 is orthologous with At4g17480, and the sequenced regions contain no orthologue of At4g17470. However, we were unable to construct a robust phylogeny for At5g47330, At5g47340, At5g47350, and B.m00415 and were unable to define the orthology relationship of B. oleracea genes B.m00414 and C.m00448. We postulate that these results are the consequence of the loss of members of the gene family from the ancestor of the A. thaliana chromosome 5 segment (including the orthologue of B.m00414 and C.m0448) and of amplification, to three copies, of the orthologue of B.m00415.

View larger version (15K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 3. Phylogenic Analysis of an Inverted Duplicate Array Present in Both A. thaliana Daughter Segments of the Genome Duplication. Left, overview of the positions of the members of the analyzed gene family across the sequence contigs. Right, phylogeny illustrated as a maximum likelihood cladogram. Bootstrap support, calculated from 1000 replicates, is shown at each branch as a percentage.

View larger version (15K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 4. Phylogenic Analysis of a Parallel Triplicate Array Present in Both A. thaliana Daughter Segments of the Genome Duplication. Left, overview of the positions of the members of the analyzed gene family across the sequence contigs. Right, phylogeny illustrated as a maximum likelihood cladogram. Bootstrap support, calculated from 1000 replicates, is shown at each branch as a percentage. The subgroup represents a cluster of sequences (At5g47350, B.m00415, At5g47340, and At5g47330) for which a robust phylogeny could not be constructed.

Analysis of the sequence homologies of modeled genes, where significant matches were identified, generally revealed high similarity to A. thaliana nuclear genes. However, a contiguous segment of sequence contig B (encompassing gene models B.m00046 to B.m00053) revealed high homology (E value < 1e^–18) with genes RPOB, PSAB, PSAA, YCF3, TRNS.3, RPS4, TRNT.2, TRNL.1, TRNF, NDHJ, PSBG, ACCD, PSAI, and YCF4, which are encoded in the segment 23 to 60 kb of the A. thaliana chloroplast genome. The sequence assembly was rechecked, and the origin of the sequence data was determined to have been from an internal region of the BAC insert, ruling out chimerism. Thus, the result is indicative of the integration of plastid DNA into the nuclear genome.

There is little database evidence supporting most of the B. oleracea gene models outside the conserved collinear genes. There are, however, four models, as listed in Table 6 , that appear to contain intact genes that have homologues located elsewhere in the A. thaliana genome. There are no related genes in the other B. oleracea sequence contigs, suggesting that the observed breakdown of collinearity between B. oleracea and A. thaliana is not likely to be the result of deletion of the corresponding genes from the Arabidopsis lineage since divergence. More likely, these were inserted into their present positions in the B. oleracea genome since the genome triplication in the Brassica lineage.

To assess how common the translocation and insertion of gene fragments might be, we analyzed all of the sequence contigs by deconstructing them to 1000-bp overlapping segments and using BLASTN to identify homology with the coding regions of genes annotated in A. thaliana. Full details of the homologies detected across the sequence contigs by this approach are presented in Supplemental Table 1 online. The result, after exclusion of transposons, collinear gene fragments, and the four noncollinear apparently intact genes, was the identification of 155 apparent gene fragments distributed across the sequence contigs, as summarized in Table 2. Twelve of these were selected, on the basis of covering a wide range of BLASTN E values, and the alignments of the sequences were characterized in greater detail. The results are summarized in Table 7 . None of the sequences represented intact genes. Eight of these gene fragments corresponded to regions of genes containing introns, and in all cases low homology sequences were present in the positions expected for introns. This finding shows the gene fragments to be of genomic origin rather than pseudogenes derived from reverse transcription of mRNA. There was also a strong bias for the sequences being homologous with the 3' half of genes, with seven being near (or including) the 3' end, five being near the middle of the gene, and none being near the 5' end. To assess the proportion of these fragments that may be artifacts caused by the erroneous inclusion of transposon sequences into the A. thaliana gene models, we conducted BLAST analyses of the coding sequences of these genes against the whole genome sequence and found no evidence of homology with transposons known in A. thaliana. We conclude that the 155 interstitial gene fragments are largely derived from protein-coding genes.

	DISCUSSION

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION RESULTS DISCUSSION METHODS REFERENCES

Genome Evolution by Gene Loss
Interspersed gene loss from duplicated genome segments was observed in A. thaliana by the analysis of genome sequence data (Arabidopsis Genome Initiative, 2000; Bancroft, 2001) and is also extensive in the triplicated genome segments of B. oleracea. The mechanism for such gene loss cannot be discerned from the analysis of a single genome. However, Brassica and Arabidopsis are sufficiently closely related that sequence drift alone would not be expected to have completely erased the sequence homology in pseudogenes. Most of the genes inferred to have been lost show no detectable residual sequence homology in B. oleracea, indicating a deletion mechanism for gene loss, rather than sequence drift. A prediction of the deletion hypothesis is that, in some instances, only parts of genes will have been deleted and the residual fragments should show discernible homology. We observed this on 10 occasions, confirming that gene deletion is most likely the mechanism responsible for the widely observed interstitial gene loss from duplicated segments of plant genomes.

Although it is the loss of genes from the triplicated B. oleracea genome segments that is predominant, we were able to identify one example of deletion of a gene in the Arabidopsis lineage. This finding demonstrates that, although the rate of genome change in A. thaliana is much lower than that in B. oleracea, presumably because the much greater genetic redundancy in the more recent polyploid means that loss of genes is less likely to be detrimental to fitness, its genome is still undergoing the diploidization process. Therefore, the genome of A. thaliana provides a good, but imperfect, representation of the ancestral genome of the Brassica lineage.

Increase in Gene Number by Genome Duplication
Excluding transposable elements, the 2.2 Mb of the B. oleracea genome we sequenced contains at least 181 genes. Of these, 177 show conserved synteny with their homologues in the two A. thaliana genome segments, and 4 are in noncollinear positions. Assuming that the genome of the progenitor of the Brassiceae at the point of genome triplication contained three intact genome segments, each representing the Arabidopsis-like progenitor genome, a total of 274 genes would have been present (271 corresponding to the genuine genes still present in the A. thaliana genome segment, as shown in Figure 2 and listed in Table 1, plus three copies of the gene inferred to have been present in that ancestral species between the predecessors of genes modeled as At4g17430 and At4g17440). Thus, 65% of genes have been retained in B. oleracea. Extrapolation to the whole genome scale provides us with an estimation of the minimum number of genes in B. oleracea as 48,750 in collinear positions and >1000 in noncollinear positions relative to A. thaliana (assuming that the regions are representative of the genome as a whole and that A. thaliana contains 25,000 genuine genes). The genome of B. oleracea is more than four times the size of the A. thaliana genome (Arumuganthan and Earle, 1991), but our results show that only a small proportion of the increased size is attributable to additional genes.

Genome Evolution by Sequence Insertion
Transposable elements represent one source of intergenic sequences. These ranged in frequency from one per 177 kb in contig D to one per 23 kb in contig E. There were, however, other sources of inserted sequences. There was one example of integration of plastid sequences into the nuclear genome. This appears to be common in plants, with many examples identified in rice (International Rice Genome Sequencing Project, 2005). An unexpected source of new sequences is genomic fragments of genes originating from elsewhere within the genome. This has occurred extensively, with 155 potential instances having been identified. Many of these (95) coincide with gene models that do not represent conserved collinear orthologues of A. thaliana genes. Because part of the evidence for automated gene model construction is homology with known genes, it is likely that these insertions are driving extensive erroneous gene prediction. Extrapolating to the whole genome, B. oleracea could contain >40,000 interstitial insertions of gene fragments. A likely mechanism is capture and replication by transposable elements, akin to Pack-MULE (Jiang et al., 2004) or Helitron-mediated translocation of gene fragments (Lai et al., 2005), although the 3' bias of the inserted gene fragments, which was not observed for Pack-MULE or Helitron-mediated translocation, suggests that a different transposon system is likely to be responsible.

Conclusions
We conducted an extensive sequence-based analysis of the Brassica genome triplication event across complete sets of paralogous Brassica genome segments descended from both daughters of the genome duplication. Our studies have provided direct evidence that the interspersed loss of protein-coding genes, which has been widely observed in duplicated segments of plant genomes, is the result of a deletion mechanism rather than of sequence drift. We have also provided evidence in Brassica for the insertion of apparently intact protein-coding genes that originate from elsewhere in the genome (as opposed to originating by tandem duplication). In addition, our studies have demonstrated, in a dicot species, that the dispersal of fragments of protein-coding genes, of genomic origin, is extensive; such widespread insertions were previously reported only in grasses (Jiang et al., 2004; International Rice Genome Sequencing Project, 2005; Lai et al., 2005). We implicate such inserted fragments in the overcalling that we (and others) often encounter with automated sequence annotation systems. Thus, many of the insights from our analyses must be taken into account when using comparative approaches to gene isolation from Brassica. In particular, we can expect many exceptions to genome collinearity, even for functional genes.

	METHODS

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION RESULTS DISCUSSION METHODS REFERENCES

 
BAC Sequencing
Purified BAC DNA was sheared by nebulization, size-selected (2 to 3 or 10 to 12 kb), and ligated into a pUC-derived vector, pHOS1, using BstXI linkers. Clones were sequenced from both ends using ABI Big Dye terminator chemistry on ABI 3700 or 3730xl sequencing machines. Sequences were assembled using the TIGR assembler, and additional directed sequencing reactions were performed as necessary to complete the sequence to high quality.

Sequence Annotation
Annotation of the BAC assemblies was performed using the TIGR annotation pipeline, a collection of software known as Eukaryotic Genome Control that serves as the central data management system. Each BAC sequence was processed through a series of algorithms for predicting genes (Genscan+, Genemark.hmm, and Glimmer) (Burge and Karlin, 1997; Lukashin and Borodovsky, 1998; Salzberg et al., 1999), splice sites (Hebsgaard et al., 1996; Pertea et al., 2001), and tRNAs (Lowe and Eddy, 1997). The AAT package (Huang et al., 1997) was used for homology searches against nucleotide and protein databases, including plant-specific cDNA and EST sequences, TIGR plant gene indices (Quackenbush et al., 2000), a nonredundant amino acid database filtered from public sources, and SwissProt (Bairoch and Apweiler, 2000). Proteins encoded by gene models generated by the database searches and predictions were further searched against Markov model databases, including Pfam (Bateman et al., 2002), and automatically assigned a putative name based on domain hits or homology with previously identified proteins. Gene structures and names were manually inspected and refined as necessary. Annotated gene models were also searched against a curated database of transposon-encoded proteins (ftp://ftp.tigr.org/pub/data/TransposableElements/transposon_db.pep). The top match from each hit was used to classify the transposons, which are treated as a separate data set. Predicted proteins <100 amino acids in length with no database support were excluded from the annotation and gene counts.

Sequence Deconstruction and BLAST Analysis Tool
We developed an alignment tool that deconstructs a sequence contig into overlapping segments of 1000 bp and conducts BLASTN searches against a database of Arabidopsis thaliana coding sequences named by Arabidopsis Genome Initiative code. The tabular output permits a rapid (<5 min) visual inspection of collinearity between the genes present on the Brassica BAC and the Arabidopsis genome. This differs from existing synteny assessment tools in that it is fast and uses all of the BAC sequence, rather than restricting the analysis to the predicted proteins. Thus, the tool can detect gene fragments not incorporated into gene models. The tool is accessible as part of a publicly available analysis pipeline that is under development (http://brassica.bbsrc.ac.uk/annotate.html).

Phylogenetic Analysis
Protein sequences were aligned using the MUSCLE program (Edgar, 2004), and alignments were edited with GeneDoc (Nicholas et al., 1997). Phylogenetic analysis was performed with the PHYLIP version 3.6 software package (Felsenstein, 1989). The SEQBOOT program was used to generate 1000 bootstrap alignments. The maximum likelihood program PROML was used to generate the bootstrap trees, for each of which the sequence order was jumbled 10 times, with the global rearrangement option enabled. The final extended majority rule consensus tree was generated with the CONSENSE program. Cladograms were displayed with Tree Explorer, in the MEGA version 3.1 software (Kumar et al., 2004), and rooted with the midpoint method using RETREE in the PHYLIP version 3.6 software package (Felsenstein, 1989). To check consistency between approaches, phylogenies were also constructed as neighbor-joining trees with p-distance correction, using MEGA version 3.1 (Kumar et al., 2004).

Divergence Calculations
For every possible paralogous or homologous gene pair, we performed protein back-translated nucleotide alignments and calculated the synonymous substitution rate as well as overall sequence identity using the PAML package assuming model 0, similar to the approach described by Maere et al. (2005). Putative pairs with relatively low sequence identity (<50% at the amino acid level) generated anomalous values and were excluded.

Accession Numbers
Accession numbers for the sequence contigs are listed in Table 1.

Supplemental Data
The following materials are available in the online version of this article.

Supplemental Table 1. Summary of BLASTN Analysis with Contig Sequences Deconstructed to Overlapping 1-kb Segments.

Supplemental Figure 1. Multiple Alignments for Figure 1.

Supplemental Figure 2. Deletion Mechanism for Gene Loss.

Supplemental Figure 3. Multiple Alignments for Figure 3.

Supplemental Figure 4. Multiple Alignments for Figure 4.

Supplemental Figure 5. Gene Fragment Accounting for Rearrangement Detected by Hybridization-Based Mapping.

	Acknowledgments

 
This work was funded by a U.K. Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council competitive support grant to I.B. and M.T. and by U.S. National Science Foundation Cooperative Agreement DBI-9813586 to TIGR.

	Footnotes

 
The author responsible for distribution of materials integral to the findings presented in this article in accordance with the policy described in the Instructions for Authors (www.plantcell.org) is: Ian Bancroft (ian.bancroft{at}bbsrc.ac.uk).

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Article, publication date, and citation information can be found at www.plantcell.org/cgi/doi/10.1105/tpc.106.041665.

Received February 2, 2006; Revision received March 21, 2006. accepted March 28, 2006.

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