Traditionally, structural variation refers to genomic alterations that are larger than 1 kb in
length, but advances in discovery techniques have led to the detection of smaller events. Currently,
>50 bp is used as an operational demarcation between indels and copy number variants (CNVs).
The schematic depicts deletions, novel sequence insertions, mobile-element insertions, tandem and
interspersed segmental duplications, inversions and translocations in a test genome (lower line)
when compared with the reference genome.