In 2001, the first nearly complete sequence of a vertebrate genome, the human genome, was published (1, 2). Soon after, several other genomes of vertebrates such as mouse, rat, dog, opossum, and chicken were reported. The tremendous effort put into sequencing and assembling these genome sequences is a prerequisite to furthering our understanding of genetic information and its role in development, disease, and evolution. One of the first insights from comparative genomics was unexpected, namely, that the majority of human genes have a single identifiable ortholog in other vertebrate species (3,...

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