Evaluating synteny for improved comparative studies.

Motivation: Comparative genomics aims to understand the structure and function of genomes by translating knowledge gained about some genomes to the object of study. Early approaches used pairwise comparisons, but today researchers are attempting to leverage the larger potential of multi-way comparisons. Comparative genomics relies on the structuring of genomes into syntenic blocks: blocks of sequence that exhibit conserved features across the genomes.