RT Journal Article
T1 350 My of Mitochondrial Genome Stasis in Mosses, an Early Land Plant Lineage
A1 Liu, Yang
A1 Medina Bujalance, Rafael
A1 Goffinet, Bernard
AB Among land plants, angiosperms have the structurally most labile mitochondrial (mt) genomes. In contrast, the so-called early land plants (e.g., mosses) seem to have completely static mt chromosomes. We assembled the complete mt genomes from 12 mosses spanning the moss tree of life, to assess 1) the phylogenetic depth of the conserved mt gene content and order and 2) the correlation between scattered sequence repeats and gene order lability in land plants. The mt genome of most mosses is approximately 100 kb in size, and thereby the smallest among land plants. Based on divergence time estimates, moss mt genome structure has remained virtually frozen for 350 My, with only two independent gene losses and a single gene relocation detected across the macroevolutionary tree. This is the longest period of mt genome stasis demonstrated to date in a plant lineage. The complete lack of intergenic repeat sequences, considered to be essential for intragenomic recombinations, likely accounts for the evolutionary stability of moss mt genomes.
PB Oxford University Press
SN 0737-4038
YR 2014
FD 2014
LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/100432
UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/100432
LA eng
NO Yang Liu, Rafael Medina, Bernard Goffinet, 350 My of Mitochondrial Genome Stasis in Mosses, an Early Land Plant Lineage, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Volume 31, Issue 10, October 2014, Pages 2586–2591, https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msu199
NO National Science Foundation 
DS Docta Complutense
RD 30 jul 2025