Publications - Working papers
Please find below working papers of our group. Currently, we list 58 working papers.
In the list are only not published papers present. If you look for a preprint of an already published paper you must look in the "Published papers" section.
If you have problems accessing electronic information, please let us know:
©NOTICE: All working 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
Abdullah H. Sahyoun, Matthias Bernt, Peter F. Stadler, Kifah Tout
Download
Abstract
The comprehensive understanding of mitochondrial genome evolution requires a
detail 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 origins 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.