The raw data for the human, cat, mouse comparisons is in the Excel Spreadsheet LocusList101399.xls, provided by Bill Murphy at the National Cancer Institute.
Guillaume Bourque identified common markers, either in all three species, or in pairs of them, and assigned consecutive numbers 1, 2, ..., n to the markers in each comparison. The spreadsheet does not contain information giving the direction (sign) of each gene. His programs assign signs to genes if there are blocks of consecutive genes conserved among the genomes, and discards other genes. GRIMM implements the Hannenhalli and Pevzner algorithm for unsigned genomes to determine an optimal assignment of signs, and Tesler's extension of this to multichromosomal genomes; however, when the data is too complex, obtaining an exact answer can be time consuming or impossible.
It took 27 minutes for GRIMM to compute optimal signs, so our demonstration data (available on a menu on the GRIMM web page) includes the computed sign information that was not present in the experimental data.
This page was created by Glenn Tesler, University of California, San Diego.