The high similarity between the mitochondrial genome and its genomic insertion makes it difficult to define the origin of these transcripts.
Working on an observation made by other scientists that mitochondria contain DNA, just as a cell's nucleus does, Dr. Attardi helped investigate the mitochondrial genome and how those genes are expressed.
The researchers started by generating new sequence data (sampling sites are indicated with red dots in Figure 1B) for canid cytochrome b, a gene in the mitochondrial genome, and combined them with sequences from the two previously published studies (doi 10.1371/journal.pone.0016385 & doi 10.1371/journal.pone.0042740).0042740
Ischemia also affects the mitochondrial genome and mitochondrial transcript and protein synthesis.
Cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS) is caused by chimeric open reading frames in the mitochondrial genome, and is common in higher plants.
Krings and colleagues sequenced a 379-base-pair section of the mitochondrial genome and found that the H. neanderthalensis sequence is very different from living human sequences.
This suggests that an ancestral group II intron may have been implicated in the evolution of the mitochondrial genome and its peculiar rRNA gene organization.
By studying the mitochondrial genome, and the X and Y chromosomes, we can trace female and male lineages throughout modern human history, including patterns of migrations of populations over the last 60,000 years.
Plants are genetically even more complex, because most require three coevolved genomes: a nuclear genome, a mitochondrial genome, and a chloroplast genome that originated from cyanobacteria and now carries out photosynthesis in plants (Archibald 2009).
For each specimen, they sequenced 685 bases from the fastest-mutating part of the animal's mitochondrial genome and then assessed the genetic diversity of ancient herds.
This array platform provides tiled coverage of the entire mitochondrial genome and high-density coverage of a set of nuclear genes involving mitochondrial and metabolic disorders and can be used to evaluate large deletions in targeted genes.
