Section: New Results

Genome rearrangements

Participants : Aude Darracq, Jean-Stéphane Varré.

We ended the study of the rearrangement events of maize mitogenomes. Thanks to the analysis of the data we showed that tandem duplications with loss could be a common evolutionary mechanism in both plant and animal mitochondrial genomes. Such events are well-known in animals. We then proposed a method to deal with duplicated genes under this assumption and built for the first time an evolutionary scenario between mitochondrial genomes in higher plants (article under revision in BMC Genomics).

The sequencing project of beet mitochondrial genomes revealed a high difficulty in the assembling process because of a large number of duplicates in those genomes. The tandem duplication with loss hypothesis suggested us biological experiments (PCRs) allowing for contig assembly. The genomes will be available during November, 2009.