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Review
. 2004 Jul;16(7):1661-6.
doi: 10.1105/tpc.160771.

Circular chloroplast chromosomes: the grand illusion

Arnold J Bendich  1
Affiliations
Review

Circular chloroplast chromosomes: the grand illusion

Arnold J Bendich. Plant Cell. 2004 Jul.
No abstract available

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Chloroplast DNA Structure and Recombination-Dependent DNA Replication. (A) The end of a monomeric genome recombines with another molecule and initiates replication. Replication procedes to the right to generate product 1, an all-blue head-to-tail concatemer. Digestion with a restriction endonuclease that cleaves the genome once, at the site marked in red, yields a genome-size fragment. An alternative recombination initiates leftward replication to generate product 2, a head-to-tail concatemer containing an inverted (green) segment, that yields a larger-than-genome-sized fragment. Bold arrows indicate the direction of replication. The IRs are indicated by thick gray and black lines. (B) A multigenomic structure produced by recombination-dependent replication. (C) Circular forms of the genome produced by intramolecular recombination (flipping). Note that the larger-than-genome-sized fragment predicted by the map of product 2, and detected by Oldenburg and Bendich (2004), cannot be generated from genome-sized circles.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
A Multigenomic Chloroplast DNA Structure. This ethidium-stained structure was obtained from meristematic tissue of maize. Similarly complex cpDNA forms were found for every plant species examined, including watermelon and pea (Bendich, 1991), Arabidopsis (Rowan et al., 2004), wheat, and Medicago truncatula. No such complex forms were reported for pea and maize (Kolodner and Tewari, 1972, 1975a).
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