In the late 1980s, Jeffrey Palmer and his colleagues discovered a remarkable and novel pattern of evolutionary change in plant organelles.They compared the mitochondrial genomes of cabbage and turnip, which are very closely related (many genes are 99% identical). To their surprise, these molecules, which are almost identical in gene sequences, differ dramatically in two order. This discovery and many other studies in the last decades convincingly proved that genome rearrangements represent a common mode of molecular evolution.
Every study of genome rearrangements involves solving a combinatorial "puzzle" to find a series of rearrangements that transform one genome into another. We are trying to reconstruct rearrangements and to reveal the ancestral mammalian genome achitecture.