On pairwise distances and median score of three genomes under DCJ

In comparative genomics, the rearrangement distance between two genomes (equal the minimal number of genome rearrangements required to transform them into a single genome) is often used for measuring their evolutionary remoteness. Generalization of this measure to three genomes is known as the median score (while a resulting genome is called median genome). In contrast to the rearrangement distance between two genomes which can be computed in linear time, computing the median score for three genomes is NP-hard. This inspires a quest for simpler and faster approximations for the median score, the most natural of which appears to be the halved sum of pairwise distances which in fact represents a lower bound for the median score. In this work, we study relationship and interplay of pairwise distances between three genomes and their median score under the model of Double-Cut-and-Join (DCJ) rearrangements. Most remarkably we show that while a rearrangement may change the sum of pairwise distances by at most 2 (and thus change the lower bound by at most 1), even the most "powerful" rearrangements in this respect that increase the lower bound by 1 (by moving one genome farther away from each of the other two genomes), which we call strong, do not necessarily affect the median score. This observation implies that the two measures are not as well-correlated as one's intuition may suggest. We further prove that the median score attains the lower bound exactly on the triples of genomes that can be obtained from a single genome with strong rearrangements. While the sum of pairwise distances with the factor 2/3 represents an upper bound for the median score, its tightness remains unclear. Nonetheless, we show that the difference of the median score and its lower bound is not bounded by a constant.Comment: Proceedings of the 10-th Annual RECOMB Satellite Workshop on Comparative Genomics (RECOMB-CG), 2012. (to appear

Compound radiointerferometer with independent heterodynes for the investigation of emission sources radioimages

Compound radio interferometer with independent heterodynes to investigate radio emission source

Photodissociation of interstellar ArH+

Aims. Following the recent detection of 36ArH+ in the Crab nebula spectrum, we have computed the photodissociation rate of ArH+ in order to constrain the physical processes at work in this environment. Methods. Photodissociation cross sections of ArH+ are computed in an ab initio approach including explicit account of spin-orbit coupling. Results. We report the photodissociation cross section of ArH+ as a function of wavelength. Photodissociation probabilities are derived for different impinging radiation fields.The photodissociation probability of for a very small unshielded cloud surrounded on all sides by the unshielded InterStellar Radiation Field (ISRF) model described by Draine (1978) is equal to 9.9e-12 s-1 and 1.9e-9 s-1 in the Crab nebula conditions. The dependence on the visual extinction is obtained by using the Meudon Photon Dominated Region (PDR) code and corresponding analytical fits are provided. Conclusions. These data will help to produce a realistic chemical network to interpret the observations. Photodissociation of ArH+ is found to be moderate and the presence of this molecular ion is mainly dependent on the molecular fractionComment: 11 pages, 6 Figures, Accepted in Astronomy Astrophysic