Molecular and cytogenetic analysis of the biggest plant genomes
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| Year of publication | 2009 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Citation | |
| Description | The genus Fritillaria comprises species with the largest genomes so far reported for any plant, and at the same time, it provides extensive infrageneric genome size variation (30,000-127,000 Mb/C) along with surprising karyotype uniformity. The genus has a bicontinental distribution and both diverged groups independently show a trend of increasing genome size with divergence. Here we report a very inhomogenic AT-rich satellite repeat, representing a significant part of heterochromatic chromosome regions in the North American group which has not been found in the Eurasian Fritillaria species. To identify dispersed type of repetitive sequences most abundant in genomes of Fritillaria, we characterized about 140 kb for one species of each group with approximately equal genome size: F. imperialis (Eurasia) and F. affinis (North America). So far, the percentage of different classes of repetitive elements do not differ significantly between the two species and gypsy-type retrotransposons of various lengths were identified as the dominating component of Fritillaria genomes. |
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