Congruence between nuclear and mitochondrial genes in Demospongiae: a new hypothesis for relationships within the G4

C C Morrow1, B E Picton, D Erpenbeck

  • 1School of Biological Sciences, MBC, 97 Lisburn Road, Queen's University, Belfast BT9 7BL, UK. christinemorrow@gmail.com

Related Concept Videos

Animal Mitochondrial Genetics02:59

Animal Mitochondrial Genetics

Among all the organelles in an animal cell, only mitochondria have their own independent genomes. Animal mitochondrial DNA is a double-stranded, closed-circular molecule with around 20,000 base pairs. Mitochondrial DNA is unique in that one of its two strands, the heavy, or H, -strand is guanine rich, whereas the complementary strand is cytosine rich and called the light, or L, -strand. Compared to nuclear DNA, mitochondrial DNA has a very low percentage of non-coding regions and is marked by...
Comparing Mitochondrial, Chloroplast, and Prokaryotic Genomes02:16

Comparing Mitochondrial, Chloroplast, and Prokaryotic Genomes

The present-day mitochondrial and chloroplast genomes have retained some of the characteristics of their ancestral prokaryotes and also have acquired new attributes during their evolution within eukaryotic cells. Like prokaryotic genomes, mitochondrial and chloroplast genomes neither bind with histone-like proteins nor show complex packaging into chromosome-like structures, as observed in eukaryotes. Unlike mitotic cell divisions observed in eukaryotic cells, mitochondria and chloroplasts...
Diversity of Protists III01:27

Diversity of Protists III

Rhizaria are a diverse group of unicellular protists characterized by their threadlike cytoplasmic extensions known as pseudopodia. These structures aid in both locomotion and feeding, giving Rhizaria an amoeboid appearance. Their amoeboid morphology once led to taxonomic confusion, but molecular phylogenetics has clarified their evolutionary placement and emphasized their shared use of pseudopodia despite divergent lineages.This clade comprises diverse lineages such as Chlorarachniophyta,...
Synteny and Evolution02:31

Synteny and Evolution

John H. Renwick first coined the term “synteny” in 1971, which refers to the genes present on the same chromosomes, even if they are not genetically linked. The species with common ancestry tend to show conserved syntenic regions. Therefore, the concept of synteny is nowadays used to describe the evolutionary relationship between species.
Around 80 million years ago, the human and mice lineages diverged from the common ancestor. During the course of evolution, the ancestral chromosome underwent...
Evolutionary Relationships through Genome Comparisons02:54

Evolutionary Relationships through Genome Comparisons

Genome comparison is one of the excellent ways to interpret the evolutionary relationships between organisms. The basic principle of genome comparison is that if two species share a common feature, it is likely encoded by the DNA sequence conserved between both species. The advent of genome sequencing technologies in the late 20th century enabled scientists to understand the concept of conservation of domains between species and helped them to deduce evolutionary relationships across diverse...
Non-nuclear Inheritance01:29

Non-nuclear Inheritance

Most DNA resides in the nucleus of a cell. However, some organelles in the cell cytoplasm⁠—such as chloroplasts and mitochondria⁠—also have their own DNA. These organelles replicate their DNA independently of the nuclear DNA of the cell in which they reside. Non-nuclear inheritance describes the inheritance of genes from structures other than the nucleus.