Four species representing three genera of halophilic archaebacteria were examined for the presence of genomic sequences that encode proteins of the superoxide dismutase family. Three species, Halobacterium cutirubrum, Halobacterium sp. strain GRB, and Haloferax volcanii, contain duplicated (paralogous) genes of the sod family; a fourth species, Haloarcula marismortui, contains only a single gen...

BACKGROUND In a previous study of higher-level arthropod phylogeny, analyses of nucleotide sequences from 62 protein-coding nuclear genes for 80 panarthopod species yielded significantly higher bootstrap support for selected nodes than did amino acids. This study investigates the cause of that discrepancy. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS The hypothesis is tested that failure to distinguish the...

Aix galericulata and Tadorna ferruginea are two Anatidae species representing different taxonomic groups of Anseriformes. We used a PCR-based method to determine the complete mtDNAs of both species, and estimated phylogenetic trees based on the complete mtDNA alignment of these and 14 other Anseriforme species, to clarify Anseriform phylogenetics. Phylogenetic trees were also estimated using a ...

Mitochondrial DNA plays an important role in living organisms, and has been used as a powerful molecular marker in a variety of evolutionary studies. In this study, we determined the complete mtDNA of Bean goose (Anser fabalis), which is 16,688 bp long and contains 13 protein-coding genes, 2 rRNAs, 22 tRNAs and a control region. The arrangement is similar to that of typical Anseriform species. ...

After Ag exposure, somatic hypermutation and subsequent selection play significant roles in shaping the peripheral B cell repertoire. However, the disparate impact of each process has not been completely delineated. To address this, the mutational patterns of a large panel of productive V(H)DJ(H) rearrangements of individual human B cells were analyzed and compared with those of a previously re...

The particular environmental characteristics of deep water such as its immense scale and high pressure systems, presents technological problems that have prevented research to broaden our knowledge of deep-sea fish. Here, we described the mitogenome sequence of a deep-sea fish, Cetonurus globiceps. The genome is 17,137 bp in length, with a standard set of 22 transfer RNA genes (tRNAs), two ribo...

The availability of the human genome sequence allowed us to identify a human complement-related, C1r-like protease gene (c1r-LP) located 2 kb centromeric of the C1r gene (c1r). Compared with c1r, c1r-LP carries a large deletion corresponding to exons 4-8 of c1r. The open reading frame of the C1r-LP cDNA predicts a 50 kDa modular protein displaying 52% amino acid residue identity with the corres...

Using the (near) complete genome sequences of the yeasts Candida albicans, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and Schizosaccharomyces pombe, we address the evolution of a unique genetic code change, which involves decoding of the standard leucine-CTG codon as serine in Candida spp. By using two complementary comparative genomics approaches, we have been able to shed new light on both the origin of the n...

Naturally occurring tandemly repeat sequences are widely distributed among eukaryotes. Their evolution is characterized by genetic instability, which may arise from slippage, unequal crossover, and gene conversion (Charlesworth et al. 1994); this instability is seen in noncoding DNA (Jeffreys et al. 1994), RNA-coding genes (reviewed in Li and Graur 199 1, pp. 162169), and protein-coding genes (...

I mmunoglobulin (Ig) genes are first modified through the V(D)J (V, variable; D, diversity; J, joining) recombina-tion process in pre–B cells. The Rag1/Rag2-dependent V(D)J recombination generates a large repertoire of B lym-phocytes, each expressing a unique antibody molecule. Rearranged Ig genes are further modified by the somatic hypermu-tation process in activated germinal center B lymphocy...