Abstract
Uniparental inheritance of the chloroplast genome has been observed in a wide variety of green plants. In Chlamydomonas this phenomenon, which can be selectively inhibited by UV irradiation of mt + gametes, has been shown cytologically to be due to the preferential degradation of mt −-derived chloroplast nucleoids in young zygotes. The zygote-specific pair of zys1 genes, zys1A and zys1B, is expressed earliest among five genes isolated from a “10-min” zygote library. We report here that the ZYS1 protein, which is encoded by the invertedly duplicated zys1 gene, accumulates in zygotes and is localized in nuclei. In addition, when mt + gametes (but not mt − gametes) are UV-irradiated before mating, only very limited accumulation of ZYS1 protein can be detected in the resulting zygotes.
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Received: 29 July 1998 / 30 April 1999
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Uchida, H., Suzuki, L., Anai, T. et al. A pair of invertedly repeated genes in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii encodes a zygote-specific protein whose expression is UV-sensitive. Curr Genet 36, 232–240 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1007/s002940050495
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s002940050495