title: Creation of a novel protein-coding region at the RNA level in black pine chloroplasts: the pattern of RNA editing in the gymnosperm chloroplast is different from that in angiosperms.
abstract: The phenomenon of RNA editing has been found to occur in chloroplasts of several angiosperm plants. Comparative analysis of the entire nucleotide sequence of a gymnosperm [Pinus thunbergii (black pine)] chloroplast genome allowed us to predict several potential editing sites in its transcripts. Forty-nine such sites from 14 genes/ORFs were analyzed by sequencing both cDNAs from the transcripts and the corresponding chloroplast DNA regions, and 26 RNA editing sites were identified in the transcripts from 12 genes/ORFs, indicating that chloroplast RNA editing is not restricted to angiosperms but occurs in the gymnosperm, too. All the RNA editing events are C-to-U conversions; however, many new codon substitutions and creation of stop codons that have not so far been reported in angiosperm chloroplasts were observed. The most striking is that two editing events result in the creation of an initiation and a stop codon within a single transcript, leading to the formation of a new reading frame of 33 codons. The predicted product is highly homologous to that deduced from the ycf7 gene (ORF31), which is conserved in the chloroplast genomes of many other plant species.
authors.affiliation: Center for Gene Research, Nagoya University, Japan.
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Wakasugi
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Hirose
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Horihata
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Tsudzuki
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kössel
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sugiura
mesh_terms: D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D005075:Biological Evolution; D002736:Chloroplasts / Q000235:genetics*; D003062:Codon; D017343:Genes, Plant; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D017393:RNA Editing; D018747:RNA, Chloroplast / Q000235:genetics*; D017386:Sequence Homology, Amino Acid; D014197:Trees / Q000235:genetics*
chemical_list: D003062:Codon; D018747:RNA, Chloroplast