Copyright information:Taken from "Hotspots of mammalian chromosomal evolution"Genome Biology 2004;5(4):R23-R23.Published online 8 Mar 2004PMCID:PMC395782.Copyright © 2004 Bailey et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article: verbatim copying and redistribution of this article are permitted in all media for any purpose, provided this notice is preserved along with the article's original URL. We performed simulation studies to determine the significance of the observed association of segmental duplications with breakpoints by randomly reassigning breakpoints to positions within the assayed genomic sequence (see Materials and methods). Not once in 10,000 replicates did the simulated count exceed the observed number of duplication-positive breakpoints.