Woo et al. (2003) observed that tRNA genes in Penicillium mitochondrial genomes STI571 in vitro rarely encoded an intron, with the exception that one 15-bp intron was predicted in tRNA-Pro in P. marneffei; in P. digitatum, all mitochondrial tRNA genes were intron-free. In Penicillium and Aspergillus species, two distinct, 20-tRNA genes containing similar tRNA gene clusters were found that were flanked by cox3, rnl and cox1. It was interesting that the similarity of tRNA gene clusters was not associated with their phylogenetic relatedness, e.g. tRNA-His was located in the tRNA cluster flanked by rnl and cox1 in A. niger, A. tubingensis and P. marneffei,

but was located between cox1 and atp9 in P. digitatum (Fig. 2), showing the close relationship between

Aspergillus and Penicillium mitochondria and indicating that recombination events have occurred in P. digitatum. Both small subunit (rns) and large subunit rRNA (rnl) were identified in the P. digitatum mitochondrial genome, with a length of 1398 and 3592 bp, respectively. selleck chemicals The rns gene showed 98% and 86% identity to that in P. chrysogenum and P. marneffei, respectively. The rnl gene contained one group I intron with a length of 1670 bp, which encoded the protein RPS5. The same structure of rnl was also found in the mitochondrial genomes of P. chrysogenum and P. marneffei, as well as in Aspergillus species. This work was supported by the National Natural Foundation of Science of China (30571236 and 31071649) and the earmarked fund for

the Modern Agro-industry Technology Research System (MATRS). “
“Alkylating agents are widespread in the environment and also occur endogenously. They can be cytotoxic or mutagenic to the cells introducing alkylated bases to DNA or RNA. All organisms have evolved multiple DNA repair mechanisms to counteract the effects of DNA alkylation: the most cytotoxic lesion, N3-methyladenine (3meA), is excised by AlkA glycosylase initiating base excision repair (BER); toxic N1-methyladenine (1meA) and N3-methylcytosine (3meC), induced in DNA and RNA, are removed by AlkB dioxygenase; and mutagenic and cytotoxic O6-methylguanine (O6meG) is repaired by Ada methyltransferase. In Escherichia coli, Ada response involves the expression of four genes, ada, alkA, alkB, and aidB, encoding respective proteins Ada, AlkA, AlkB, Vitamin B12 and AidB. The Ada response is conserved among many bacterial species; however, it can be organized differently, with diverse substrate specificity of the particular proteins. Here, an overview of the organization of the Ada regulon and function of individual proteins is presented. We put special effort into the characterization of AlkB dioxygenases, their substrate specificity, and function in the repair of alkylation lesions in DNA/RNA. “
“Phosphatidylcholine, the major phospholipid in eukaryotes, is found in rhizobia and in many other bacteria interacting with eukaryotic hosts.