A Pattern Analysis of Gene Conversion Literature.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Comparative and Functional Genomics Volume 2009, Article ID 761512, 11 pages doi:10.1155/2009/761512 Review Article A Pattern Analysis of Gene Conversion Literature Mark J. Lawson, Jian Jiao, Weiguo Fan, and Liqing Zhang Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Mark J. Lawson, malawso4@vt.edu Received 25 September 2009; Accepted 15 November 2009 Recommended by Antoine Danchin Gene conversion is an important biological process that involves the transfer of genetic (sequence) information from one gene to another. This can have a variety of effects on an organism, both short-term and long-term and both positive and detrimental. In an effort to better understand this process, we searched through over 3,000 abstracts that contain research on gene conversions, tagging the important data and performing an analysis on what we extract. Through this we established trends that give a better insight into gene conversion research and genetic research in general. Our results show the importance of the process and the importance of continuing gene conversion research. Copyright © 2009 Mark J. Lawson et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 1. Introduction in the human major histocompatiblity complex genes (the HLA genes). Here new alleles are created through gene At its most basic level, gene conversion is the exchange conversions of