Transcription-related mutations and GC content drive variation in nucleotide substitution rates across the genomes of Arabidopsis thaliana and Arabidopsis lyrata.

ABSTRACT:

Background

There has been remarkably little study of nucleotide substitution rate variation among plant nuclear genes, in part because orthology is difficult to establish. Orthology is even more problematic for intergenic regions of plant nuclear genomes, because plant genomes generally harbor a wealth of repetitive DNA. In theory orthologous intergenic data is valuable for studying rate variation because nucleotide substitutions in these regions should be under little selective constraint compared to coding regions. As a result, evolutionary rates in intergenic regions may more accurately reflect genomic features, like recombination and GC content, that contribute to nucleotide substitution.

Results

We generated a set of 66 intergenic sequences in Arabidopsis lyrata, a clos

SUBMITTER: DeRose-Wilson LJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1865379 | biostudies-literature | 2007 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature