Publications - Published papers
Please find below publications of our group. Currently, we list 565 papers. Some of the publications are in collaboration with the group of Sonja Prohaska and are also listed in the publication list for her individual group. Access to published papers (
) is restricted to our local network and chosen collaborators.
If you have problems accessing electronic information, please let us know:
) is restricted to our local network and chosen collaborators.
If you have problems accessing electronic information, please let us know:©NOTICE: All papers are copyrighted by the authors; If you would like to use all or a portion of any paper, please contact the author.
The correlation of genome size and DNA methylation rate in metazoans
Marcus Lechner, Manja Marz, Christian Ihling, Andrea Sinz, Peter F. Stadler, Veiko Krauss
Download
Status: Published
Th. Biosci. 132:47–60 (2013)
Abstract
Total DNA methylation rates are well known to
vary widely between different metazoans. The phylogenetic
distribution of this variation, however, has not been
investigated systematically. We combine here publicly
available data on methylcytosine content with the analysis
of nucleotide compositions of genomes and transcriptomes
of 78 metazoan species to trace the evolution of abundance
and distribution of DNA methylation. The depletion of
CpG and the associated enrichment of TpG and CpA
dinucleotides are used to infer the intensity and localization
of germline CpG methylation and to estimate its evolutionary
dynamics. We observe a positive correlation of the
relative methylation of CpG motifs with genome size. We
tested this trend successfully by measuring total DNA
methylation with LC/MS in orthopteran insects with very
different genome sizes: house crickets, migratory locusts
and meadow grasshoppers. We hypothesize that the
observed correlation between methylation rate and genome size is due to a dependence of both variables from longterm
effective population size and is driven by the accumulation
of repetitive sequences that are typically methylated
during periods of small population sizes. This
process may result in generally methylated, large genomes
such as those of jawed vertebrates. In this case, the emergence
of a novel demethylation pathway and of novel
reader proteins for methylcytosine may have enabled the
usage of cytosine methylation for promoter-based gene
regulation. On the other hand, persistently large populations
may lead to a compression of the genome and to the
loss of the DNA methylation machinery, as observed, e.g.,
in nematodes.