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Genomic 'haircut' makes world's tiniest genome even smaller

Date:
September 23, 2010
Source:
University of British Columbia
Summary:
The world's tiniest nuclear genome appears to have "snipped off the ends" of its chromosomes and evolved into a lean, mean, genome machine that infects human cells, according to new research.
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The world's tiniest nuclear genome appears to have "snipped off the ends" of its chromosomes and evolved into a lean, mean, genome machine that infects human cells, according to research published September 21 by University of British Columbia scientists.

Until recently, E. cuniculi, a parasitic fungus commonly found in rabbits that can also be fatal to immunocompromised humans, has been widely regarded as having the smallest known nuclear genome. At 2.9 millions base pairs (Mbp) and approximately 2,000 genes, the genome of E. cuniculi is less than one-two thousandth the size of the human genome.

But now, a team of researchers led by UBC Botany Prof. Patrick Keeling sequenced the genome of a closely related parasite that makes the E. cuniculi genome seem positively king-sized. The genome of E. intestinalis, a sister species of E. cuniculi that infects human intestines, is 20 per cent smaller, at only 2.3Mbp.

"On one end of the spectrum, genomes can get larger almost without limit, but there is a limit to how small they can get -- they can't be less than zero," says Keeling, whose work is published in the September 21 issue of the journal Nature Communications. "And the question that fascinated us was 'in an already tiny genome, what else can be lost'?"

Keeling and a team of researchers from Switzerland, Canada and the U.S. compared the genome of E. cuniculi and E. intestinalis and found little difference between the chromosome "cores" but that the ends were all "trimmed" in E. intestinalis.

"The chromosomes are long threads of DNA, and in E. intestinalis its almost as though it got a haircut, removing hundreds of genes, but all from the ends of the threads," says Keeling.

Keeling, director of the Centre for Microbial Diversity and Evolution and a member of Beaty Biodiversity Research Centre at UBC, says the discovery provides insights into how genomes evolve, especially in extreme conditions.

Keeling is also a scholar with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Fellow.


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Materials provided by University of British Columbia. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


Journal Reference:

  1. Nicolas Corradi, Jean-François Pombert, Laurent Farinelli, Elizabeth S. Didier, Patrick J. Keeling. The complete sequence of the smallest known nuclear genome from the microsporidian Encephalitozoon intestinalis. Nature Communications, 2010; 1 (6): 1 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms1082

Cite This Page:

University of British Columbia. "Genomic 'haircut' makes world's tiniest genome even smaller." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 23 September 2010. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100921101335.htm>.
University of British Columbia. (2010, September 23). Genomic 'haircut' makes world's tiniest genome even smaller. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 6, 2024 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100921101335.htm
University of British Columbia. "Genomic 'haircut' makes world's tiniest genome even smaller." ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100921101335.htm (accessed December 6, 2024).

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