Publications

BMC genomics. 2006-03-22; 7.60.

Trypanosoma cruzi mitochondrial maxicircles display species- and strain-specific variation and a conserved element in the non-coding region

Westenberger SJ, Cerqueira GC, El-Sayed NM, Zingales B, Campbell DA, Sturm NR

PMID: 16553959

Abstract

The mitochondrial DNA of kinetoplastid flagellates is distinctive in the eukaryotic world due to its massive size, complex form and large sequence content. Comprised of catenated maxicircles that contain rRNA and protein-coding genes and thousands of heterogeneous minicircles encoding small guide RNAs, the kinetoplast network has evolved along with an extreme form of mRNA processing in the form of uridine insertion and deletion RNA editing. Many maxicircle-encoded mRNAs cannot be translated without this post-transcriptional sequence modification.

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