Originally published as Genetics Published Articles Ahead of Print on December 6, 2006.

Genetics, Vol. 175, 959-962, February 2007, Copyright © 2007
doi:10.1534/genetics.106.065698

Two Events Are Responsible for an Insertion in a Paternally Inherited Mitochondrial Genome of the Mussel Mytilus galloprovincialis

Department of Genetics and Marine Biotechnology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Oceanology, 81-712 Sopot, Poland

1 Author e-mail: aburzynski{at}iopan.gda.pl

Frequent nonhomologous recombination has been previously postulated to explain the 1045-bp insertion in one mitochondrial sperm-transmitted haplotype of Mytilus galloprovincialis. Such recombination would lead to the disruption of gene order and so the existence of a specific mechanism for maintaining the same gene order in both mitochondrial genomes of Mytilus has been proposed. Here the simpler explanation of the observed structure, involving a tandem duplication and a deletion, is presented. Their occasional occurrence in Mytilus mtDNA proves the similarity, not the difference, between animals with and without DUI.