Higher-order genomic organization of cellular functions in yeast.

Previous studies have shown that the distribution of genes in prokaryotes and eukaryotic genomes is not random. Using the thousands of cellular functions that appear in the Gene Ontology (GO) project, we exhaustively studied the relation between functionality and genomic localization of genes across 16 organisms with rich GO ontologies (one prokaryote and 15 eukaryotes). Overall, we found that the genomic distribution of cellular functions tends to be more similar in organisms that have higher evolutionary proximity.