The 18th In Silico Megabank Research Seminar will be held on Friday, November 30.

・Date/Time: November 30(Fri.) 17:00‐18:30
・Venue: Conference Room 1 (2F), Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization

・Lecturer: Yukuto Sato (National Institute of Genetics)
・Title: Evolutionary Conserved Feature of Mitochondrial Genome : a New Insight into  Functional Impairment and Disorder

・Abstract:
Although mitochondrial gene arrangement has been highly conserved among vertebrates from jawless fishes to mammals for more than 500 million years, the functional nature of such long-term persistence has yet to be defined over the past 20 years. We analyzed mitochondrial genome by sequence comparison, focusing on translation and replication. The result showed that the tRNA genes used more frequently for translation are more likely to be located in high expression regions (r = -0.1260, p = 0.0104, n = 336), and the regions spend in the single-stranded state during replication for a longer time are richer in G and T bases in the anti-codon regions. (r = 0.4281 p = 0.0234, n = 22).
This result indicates that arrangement of genes in mitochondrial genome is rational for both efficiency of translation and prevention of loss of function of tRNA during replication, and also provides a new insight into impairment of genome function caused by de novo mutations.