Abstract
The reannealing kinetics of denatured DNA fragments from 23 species of higher plants have been studied, using hydroxylapatite chromatography to distinguish reannealed from single-stranded DNA. The 2C nuclear DNA contents of the species varied between 1.7 and 98 pg. The proportions of DNA in species with a nuclear DNA mass above 5 pg that reannealed with the kinetics of sequences present in more than 100 copies were high (69–92% with a mean of 80±2.0%). For species with less than 4 pg of DNA, the mean proportion of repeated-sequence DNA was 62±2.9%. It is concluded that most of the variation in nuclear DNA mass in higher plant chromosomes can be accounted for by variation in repeated-sequence DNA. The consequences of altering the adapted DNA content of a species by the addition of families of repeated sequences are discussed in relation to the proportion of repeated-sequence DNA.
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Flavell, R.B., Bennett, M.D., Smith, J.B. et al. Genome size and the proportion of repeated nucleotide sequence DNA in plants. Biochem Genet 12, 257–269 (1974). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00485947
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00485947