Variation of G-rich mitochondrial transcripts among stocks of Trypanosoma brucei

We have compared maxicircle transcripts from eight stocks of subspecies of Trypanosoma brucei. Transcripts from the rRNA and protein genes have a constant size among stocks and exhibit only minor variation in abundance. In contrast, four of the G+C rich sequences encode multiple transcripts that very markedly in size or abundance. Maxicircle nucleotide sequence comparison of three stocks shows very limited sequence divergence suggesting that sequence divergence may not explain the transcript variability. These results suggest that the G-rich transcripts do not encode proteins and that their variability among stocks may result from posttranscriptional processing events.