Sorting Genomes by Reversals and Translocations

Reversal and translocation are both common rearrangement events in the evolution of mammalian species. Given two multi-chromosomal genomes A and B, the problem of sorting by reversals and translocations (SBRT) is to find a shortest sequence of reversals and translocations that transforms A into B. This problem is currently solved by a reduction to the problem of sorting by reversals (SBR), where each reversal simulates either a reciprocal translocation or an internal reversal. In this paper, we present a new algorithm for SBRT that explicitly treats translocations and reversals as distinct operations, which looks more natural and simple than the previous one.