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Updated: Jul 9, 2025
Translating Ribosome Affinity Purification TRAP to Investigate Arabidopsis thaliana Root Development at a Cell Type-Specific Scale
Published on: May 14, 2020
tRNA-Cys gene clusters exhibit high variability in Arabidopsis thaliana
Maciej Szymanski1, Anand Maurya1, Piotr Kopec1
1Department of Computational Biology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Uniwersytetu Poznanskiego 6, 61-614 Poznan, Poland.
Abstract:
Although most of the genes encoding tRNAs in plants are dispersed throughout the genome, a fraction of them form tRNA gene clusters. In Arabidopsis thaliana, the smallest of tRNA clusters on chromosome 5 consists of four tRNA-Cys-GCA genes placed within repeating units of 0.4 kbp. A systematic analysis of the genomic sequences of syntenic regions from various ecotypes of A. thaliana showed that the general structure of the cluster, consisting of a tRNA-Cys pseudogene followed by repeating units containing tRNA-Cys genes, is well conserved. However, there is significant heterogeneity in the number of repeating units between different ecotypes. A unique feature of this cluster is the presence of putative transposable elements (Helitron). In addition, two further tRNA-Cys gene mini-clusters (gene pairs) in A. thaliana were identified. RNA-seq-based evaluation of expression of tRNA-Cys-GCA genes showed a positive signal for 11 out of 13 unique transcripts. An analysis of the conservation of the tRNA-Cys clusters from A. thaliana with the corresponding regions from four other Arabidopsis species suggests a sequence of events that led to the divergence of these regions.
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