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 (
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) 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.
GC Skew and Mitochondrial Origins of Replication
Sahyoun, Abdullah H. and Bernt, Matthias and Stadler, Peter F. and Tout, Kifah
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Status: Published
Mitochondrion vol 17, pages 56-66
Abstract
The comprehensive understanding of mitochondrial genome evolution requires a detailed mechanistic picture of mitogenomic replication. Despite many previous efforts it has remained a non-trivial problem to determine the origins of replication and trace their fate across rearrangements of the gene order even in the small genomes of animal mitochondria. We elaborate here on the observation that the GC skew is correlated with the distance from the replication origins. This effect has been explained as a consequence of the standard model of mitochondrial DNA replication, i.e. the strand displacement model. According to this model chemical damage accumulates proportional to the duration that DNA is exposed in single-stranded form during replication (Dssh) which depends on the relative position with respect to the replication origins. Based on this model we developed a computational method to infer the positions of both the heavy strand and the light strand origin from nucleotide skew data. In a comprehensive survey of deuterostome mitochondria we infer conserved replication origins for the vast majority of vertebrates and cephalochordates. Deviations from the consensus picture are presumably associated with genome rearrangements.
Keywords
Chordata, Mitochondria, Replication origins, GC-skew