The differential killing of genes by inversions in prokaryotic genomes

We have elaborated a method which has allowed us to estimate the direction of translocation of orthologs which have changed, during the phylogeny, the ir positions on chromosome in respect to the leading or lagging role of DNA strands. We have shown that the relative number of translocations which ha ve switched positions of genes from the leading to the lagging DNA strand i s lower than the number of translocations which have transferred genes from the lagging strand to the leading strand of prokaryotic genomes. This para dox could be explained by assuming that the stronger mutation pressure and selection after inversion preferentially eliminate genes transferred from t he leading to the lagging DNA strand.