Abstract
Plastid genomes of the peridinin-containing dinoflagellates are composed of a limited number of genes that are contained separately on small circular molecules (minicircles). It has been shown that occasionally aberrant minicircles are generated, but they are usually small and contain little coding information. In this study, we discovered multiple variants, a putative “gene family”, of the gene psbA in the plastid minicircles of the dinoflagellate Alexandrium tamarense, which have persisted for almost 3 years in culture. Each variant, like the ordinary psbA, existed on distinct minicircles of similar size (5–6 kb). These psbA variants retained all, or almost all, the coding sequence of the ordinary gene, and all four were transcribed and edited after transcription, even though they could not encode the entire protein due to intervening or translocated sequences. Repeat elements were generally found in the relatively large non-coding region of these minicircles. Each psbA variant might have been generated by DNA recombination and/or replication slippage, as for previously reported aberrant minicircles. The fact that these minicircles are transcribed, individually edited and maintained in the genome suggests that they are functionally important, although their precise roles remain unclear.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Professor Emeriti, Masahiro Sugiura (Nagoya University) and Kimiyuki Satoh (Okayama University), for critical reading of the manuscript and for many valuable discussions. Color illustrations were prepared by Ms. H. Uchida. Sequencing was assisted by the Kobe University Research Center for Environmental Genomics. This study was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Creative Scientific Research (No. 17GS0314 to A.M.) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and partly by the Sasakawa Scientific Research Grant from The Japan Science Society (No. 21-745M to S. I.).
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Communicated by F.-A. Wollman.
Nucleotide sequence data reported are available in the DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank databases under the accession numbers: AB359447–AB359456.
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Iida, S., Kobiyama, A., Ogata, T. et al. Identification of transcribed and persistent variants of the psbA gene carried by plastid minicircles in a dinoflagellate. Curr Genet 55, 583–591 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00294-009-0271-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00294-009-0271-9