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Plant genetics

Plastid genomes — lost in translation?

Nature Reviews Genetics volume 15, page 288 (2014)Cite this article

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evidence for plastid genome loss in distinct non-photosynthetic green plants

Both teams used next-generation sequencing of the entire DNA content of the plants to look for plastid DNA. Molina and colleagues were only able to identify non-functional fragments of plastid genes, and phylogenetic analyses led the authors to suggest that these fragments might have integrated into the nuclear DNA through horizontal gene transfer from the host plant Tetrastigma. “It's always a problem trying to prove a negative,” says Michael Purugganan, a senior author of the Molina study, “but we made sure we used multiple computational techniques to try to find a plastid genome, and we also performed several experimental controls.”

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References

  1. Smith, D. R. & Lee, R. W. A plastid without a genome: evidence from the nonphotosynthetic green alga Polytomella. Plant Physiol. http://dx.doi.org/10.1104/pp.113.233718 (2014)

  2. Molina, J. et al. Possible loss of the chloroplast genome in the parasitic flowering plant Rafflesia lagascae (Rafflesiaceae). Mol. Biol. Evol. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msu051 (2014)

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Authors
  1. Bryony Jones
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Jones, B. Plastid genomes — lost in translation?. Nat Rev Genet 15, 288 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg3717

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