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Recent mobility of plastid encoded group II introns and twintrons in five strains of the unicellular red alga Porphyridium

Group II introns are closely linked to eukaryote evolution because nuclear spliceosomal introns and the small RNAs associated with the spliceosome are thought to trace their ancient origins to these mobile elements. Therefore, elucidating how group II introns move, and how they lose mobility can pot...

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Autores principales: Perrineau, Marie-Mathilde, Price, Dana C., Mohr, Georg, Bhattacharya, Debashish
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4476101/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26157604
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1017
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author Perrineau, Marie-Mathilde
Price, Dana C.
Mohr, Georg
Bhattacharya, Debashish
author_facet Perrineau, Marie-Mathilde
Price, Dana C.
Mohr, Georg
Bhattacharya, Debashish
author_sort Perrineau, Marie-Mathilde
collection PubMed
description Group II introns are closely linked to eukaryote evolution because nuclear spliceosomal introns and the small RNAs associated with the spliceosome are thought to trace their ancient origins to these mobile elements. Therefore, elucidating how group II introns move, and how they lose mobility can potentially shed light on fundamental aspects of eukaryote biology. To this end, we studied five strains of the unicellular red alga Porphyridium purpureum that surprisingly contain 42 group II introns in their plastid genomes. We focused on a subset of these introns that encode mobility-conferring intron-encoded proteins (IEPs) and found them to be distributed among the strains in a lineage-specific manner. The reverse transcriptase and maturase domains were present in all lineages but the DNA endonuclease domain was deleted in vertically inherited introns, demonstrating a key step in the loss of mobility. P. purpureum plastid intron RNAs had a classic group IIB secondary structure despite variability in the DIII and DVI domains. We report for the first time the presence of twintrons (introns-within-introns, derived from the same mobile element) in Rhodophyta. The P. purpureum IEPs and their mobile introns provide a valuable model for the study of mobile retroelements in eukaryotes and offer promise for biotechnological applications.
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spelling pubmed-44761012015-07-08 Recent mobility of plastid encoded group II introns and twintrons in five strains of the unicellular red alga Porphyridium Perrineau, Marie-Mathilde Price, Dana C. Mohr, Georg Bhattacharya, Debashish PeerJ Biotechnology Group II introns are closely linked to eukaryote evolution because nuclear spliceosomal introns and the small RNAs associated with the spliceosome are thought to trace their ancient origins to these mobile elements. Therefore, elucidating how group II introns move, and how they lose mobility can potentially shed light on fundamental aspects of eukaryote biology. To this end, we studied five strains of the unicellular red alga Porphyridium purpureum that surprisingly contain 42 group II introns in their plastid genomes. We focused on a subset of these introns that encode mobility-conferring intron-encoded proteins (IEPs) and found them to be distributed among the strains in a lineage-specific manner. The reverse transcriptase and maturase domains were present in all lineages but the DNA endonuclease domain was deleted in vertically inherited introns, demonstrating a key step in the loss of mobility. P. purpureum plastid intron RNAs had a classic group IIB secondary structure despite variability in the DIII and DVI domains. We report for the first time the presence of twintrons (introns-within-introns, derived from the same mobile element) in Rhodophyta. The P. purpureum IEPs and their mobile introns provide a valuable model for the study of mobile retroelements in eukaryotes and offer promise for biotechnological applications. PeerJ Inc. 2015-06-18 /pmc/articles/PMC4476101/ /pubmed/26157604 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1017 Text en © 2015 Perrineau et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Biotechnology
Perrineau, Marie-Mathilde
Price, Dana C.
Mohr, Georg
Bhattacharya, Debashish
Recent mobility of plastid encoded group II introns and twintrons in five strains of the unicellular red alga Porphyridium
title Recent mobility of plastid encoded group II introns and twintrons in five strains of the unicellular red alga Porphyridium
title_full Recent mobility of plastid encoded group II introns and twintrons in five strains of the unicellular red alga Porphyridium
title_fullStr Recent mobility of plastid encoded group II introns and twintrons in five strains of the unicellular red alga Porphyridium
title_full_unstemmed Recent mobility of plastid encoded group II introns and twintrons in five strains of the unicellular red alga Porphyridium
title_short Recent mobility of plastid encoded group II introns and twintrons in five strains of the unicellular red alga Porphyridium
title_sort recent mobility of plastid encoded group ii introns and twintrons in five strains of the unicellular red alga porphyridium
topic Biotechnology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4476101/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26157604
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1017
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