There is a long-standing debate in molecular evolution concerning the putative importance of GC content in adapting the thermal stabilities of DNA and RNA. Most studies of this relationship have examined broad-scale compositional patterns, for example, total GC percentages in genomes and occurrence of GC-rich isochores. Few studies have systematically examined the GC contents of individual orth...

Short INterspersed Elements (SINEs) are non-autonomous retrotransposons, usually between 100 and 500 base pairs (bp) in length, which are ubiquitous components of eukaryotic genomes. Their activity, distribution, and evolution can be highly informative on genomic structure and evolutionary processes. To determine recent activity, we amplified more than one hundred SINE1 loci in a panel of 43 M....

In bacteria and archaea, genome size and guanine–cytosine (GC) content are correlated (Bentley and Parkhill, 2004; Musto et al., 2006; Mitchell, 2007; Suzuki et al., 2008; Guo et al., 2009). These parameters show greater correlation in bacteria (Pearson’s correlation coefficient r = 0.46) than in archaea (r = 0.195) (Nishida, 2012a). The GC content in bacteria varies widely from 13.5% in “Candi...

In the present paper, I compared guanine-cytosine (GC) contents, DNA sizes, and dinucleotide frequency profiles in 109 archaeal chromosomes, 59 archaeal plasmids, 1379 bacterial chromosomes, and 854 bacterial plasmids. In more than 80% of archaeal and bacterial plasmids, the GC content was lower than that of the host chromosome. Furthermore, most of the differences in GC content found between a...

The variation of GC content is a key genome feature because it is associated with fundamental elements of genome organization. However, the reason for this variation is still an open question. Different kinds of hypotheses have been proposed to explain the variation of GC content during genome evolution. However, these hypotheses have not been explicitly investigated in whole plastome sequences...

A set of 1438 human exons was subjected to nested PCR. The initial success rate using a standard PCR protocol required for ligation-independent cloning was 83.4%. Logistic regression analysis was conducted on 27 primer- and template-related characteristics, of which most could be ignored apart from those related to the GC content of the template. Overall GC content of the template was a good pr...

Although guanine-cytosine (GC)-biased gene conversion (gBGC) following meiotic recombination seems the most probable mechanism accounting for large-scale variations in GC content for many eukaryotes, it cannot explain such variations for organisms belonging to ancient asexual lineages, such as the pathogenic fungi Candida albicans and C. dubliniensis. Analysis of the substitution patterns for t...