Genomics of Land Plants and Algae

Below it shows the list of organisms whose plastome has been completely sequenced, as obtained from the NCBI database (Table 1). 

Chloroplasts of land plants contain multiple identical circular double-stranded DNA molecules, whose size, according to different data, varies from 120 to 160 or to 220 kb. In the population of cpDNA molecules obtained by chloropiast lysis, monomeric circles prevail (-60% of all circular DNA molecules in tobacco). There also ate oligomeric forms, which are concatemers or head-to-tail associates that most probably arose during DNA recombination and/or replication, as well as atypical molecules, presumably replicative intermediates. Accordingly, the chloropiast genome is not uniform and exists in the cell as a DNA population heterogeneous in molecule size and conformation. The first complete nucleotide sequences of cpDNA were determined in 1986 for tobacco  

Biotechnological Applications of Photosynthetic Proteins Biochips, Biosensors and Biodevices, edited by Maria Teresa Giardi and Elena V. Piletska. 2006 Landes Bioscience. 

Biotechnological Applications of Photosynthetic Proteins Biochips, Biosensors and Biodevices 

Chlorella vulgaris Oenothera elata subsp.bookeri 

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In this review we focused on the recent data on the structure and functions of the chloroplast genome of land plants and algae, and only shortly discussed the problems of the origin and evolution of plastids. These problems deserve special analysis. 

We have the 120 million base pair nuclear genome for Chlamydomonas, a unicellular, photosynthetic green alga. This organism diverged from land plants more than one billion years ago. It is a ciliated organism, an innovation inherited from a progenitor of animals and plants, subsequently lost in land plants. 

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