In order to identify organizational differences between sterile Polima (pol) and fertile Campestris (cam) mitochondrial genomes that could be linked to cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS), the physical map of the pol mitochondrial genome was constructed and compared to the physical map of the cam mitochondrial genome. The only structural differences between the two genomes are confined to a region encompassed by a 4.5 kb segment, present in pol mtDNA but absent in cam mtDNA. This 4.5 kb CMS-associated pol segment contains a chimeric gene called orf224 that is cotranscribed with atpG and comprises the single mtDNA region expressed differently in fertile, sterile and fertility restored plants which makes it a good candidate for specifying the sterility trait. Sequence analysis of the pol 4.5 kb segment has shown that orf224 was the only significant open reading frame (ORF) within the segment that gives rise to abundant transcripts, strengthening the view that the orf224/atp6 gene region is conferring pol male sterility. The pol 4.5 kb segment is also present and similarly organized in the common Brassica napus nap mtDNA but the sequences flanking the two segments are unrelated. Thus, the 4.5 kb segment appears to have transposed during the evolution of the pol and nap mitochondrial genomes and appears to have been lost in the cam mitochondrial genome. Sequence analysis of the nap segment revealed the presence of an ORF related to but divergent from orf224. This open reading frame (orf222) potentially encodes a protein of 222 amino-acids with 79% homology to the predicted product of orf224. orf222 is co-transcribed with the third exon of the trans-spliced gene, nad5, and another ORF of unknown function. Expression of the orf222 gene region is tightly associated with nap CMS since the levels of orf222 transcripts are significantly reduced upon restoration while the expression of 22 other mitochondrial genes do not consistently correlate with nap CMS. Antibodies were rai
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.28810 |
| Date | January 1994 |
| Creators | L'Homme, Yvan |
| Contributors | Brown, G. G. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Biology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001467858, proquestno: NN05738, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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