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Updated: Dec 27, 2025

Genotyping Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms in the Mitochondrial Genome by Pyrosequencing
Published on: February 10, 2023
Causes and consequences of mitochondrial proteome size variation in animals
Viraj Muthye1, Dennis V Lavrov1
1Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Program, Iowa State University, 2014 Molecular Biology Building, Ames, Iowa 50011, USA; Department of Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology, Iowa State University, 251 Bessey Hall, 2200 Osborne Drive, Ames, Iowa 50011, USA.
Abstract:
Despite a conserved set of core mitochondrial functions, animal mitochondrial proteomes show a large variation in size. We analyzed putative mechanisms behind and functional significance of this variation by performing comparative analysis of the experimentally-verified mitochondrial proteomes of four bilaterian animals (human, mouse, Caenorhabditis elegans, and Drosophila melanogaster) and two non-animal outgroups (Acanthamoeba castellanii and Saccharomyces cerevisiae). We found that of several factors affecting mitochondrial proteome size, evolution of novel mitochondrial proteins in mammals and loss of ancestral proteins in protostomes were the main contributors. Interestingly, the gain and loss of the N-terminal mitochondrial targeting signal was not a major factor in the proteome size evolution.
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