Gathering intro


 * CNVs arise from gene duplication and loss, and play an important role in genome evolution (Ohno, 1970)
 * Indeed it has been argued that CNVs represent nascent gene families (Korbel et al., 2008).
 * CNVs have been shown to be related to a range of diseases (Lupski, 2007), including developmental defects (Turner et al., 2007) and autism (Glessner et al., 2009).
 * In other cases, CNVs have shown to offer an adaptive advantage. In humans, an increase in the number of copies of the amylase gene is correlated with high-starch diet (Perry et al., 2007), whereas in Plasmodium falciparum CNVs can lead to drug resistance (Nair et al., 2008).