Work

Kinetoplast DNA Network: Evolution of an Improbable Structure

Year: 2002

Type: review

Abstract: Kinetoplast DNA (kDNA) is the most structurally complex mitochondrial DNA in nature. Unique to the single mitochon-drion of unicellular flagellates of the order Kinetoplastida, kDNA is best known as a giant network of thousands of cate-nated circular DNAs (an electron micrograph of a network is shown in Fig. 1A). The kDNA circles are of two types, maxi-circles and minicircles. Maxicircles usually range from 20 to 40 kb, depending on the species, and are present in a few dozen identical copies per network. Minicircles, present in several thousand copies per network, are usually nearly identical in size (0.5 to 10 kb, depending on the species) but are hetero-geneous in sequence. Maxicircles encode typical mitochondrial gene products (e.g., rRNAs and subunits of respiratory chain complexes) but, remarkably, some of the protein-coding genes are encrypted. To generate functional mRNAs, the cryptic

Source: Eukaryotic Cell

DOI: 10.1128/ec.1.4.495-502.2002

Authors: Julius Lukeš, D. Lys Guilbride, Jan Votýpka, Alena Zíková, Rob Benne, Paul T. Englund