Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2017 Apr;214(2):842-851.
doi: 10.1111/nph.14375. Epub 2016 Dec 19.

Expansion of inverted repeat does not decrease substitution rates in Pelargonium plastid genomes

Affiliations
Free article

Expansion of inverted repeat does not decrease substitution rates in Pelargonium plastid genomes

Mao-Lun Weng et al. New Phytol. 2017 Apr.
Free article

Abstract

For species with minor inverted repeat (IR) boundary changes in the plastid genome (plastome), nucleotide substitution rates were previously shown to be lower in the IR than the single copy regions (SC). However, the impact of large-scale IR expansion/contraction on plastid nucleotide substitution rates among closely related species remains unclear. We included plastomes from 22 Pelargonium species, including eight newly sequenced genomes, and used both pairwise and model-based comparisons to investigate the impact of the IR on sequence evolution in plastids. Ten types of plastome organization with different inversions or IR boundary changes were identified in Pelargonium. Inclusion in the IR was not sufficient to explain the variation of nucleotide substitution rates. Instead, the rate heterogeneity in Pelargonium plastomes was a mixture of locus-specific, lineage-specific and IR-dependent effects. Our study of Pelargonium plastomes that vary in IR length and gene content demonstrates that the evolutionary consequences of retaining these repeats are more complicated than previously suggested.

Keywords: Pelargonium; genome rearrangement; inverted repeats (IR); nucleotide substitution rate; plastid genome.

PubMed Disclaimer

LinkOut - more resources