The human genome: organization and evolutionary history

Abstract

This review outlines briefly the compositional properties of the vertebrate genome, namely its isochore organization, the compositional patterns of DNA molecules and of coding sequences, the compositional correlations between coding and noncoding sequences, and the relationships between isochores and chromosomal bands. It then deals with the fundamental properties of the vertebrate genome, namely the distribution of genes and its associated functional features. Finally, it considers how the structural and functional organization of the human genome (and of the genomes of warm-blooded vertebrates in general) arose in evolution.