Biologists will be able to reconstruct the process of evolution, determine relationships between species and build phylogenetic trees with greater accuracy thanks to a new method for identifying “microinversions,” which are extremely short strings of inverted nucleotides. This new work from researchers at UC San Diego and Brown University appeared in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"Three years ago, we didn't know microinversions existed," explained Pavel Pevzner, the senior author on the paper, a computer science and engineering professor at UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering, and director of ...