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OTC and AUL1 , two convergent and overlapping genes in the nuclear genome of Arabidopsis thaliana
Author(s) -
Quesada Vı́ctor,
Ponce Marı́a Rosa,
Micol José Luis
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
febs letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.593
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1873-3468
pISSN - 0014-5793
DOI - 10.1016/s0014-5793(99)01426-x
Subject(s) - biology , genetics , gene , arabidopsis thaliana , genome , locus (genetics) , arabidopsis , eukaryote , nuclear dna , genomic dna , transcription (linguistics) , multicellular organism , dna , mutant , mitochondrial dna , linguistics , philosophy
In contrast to bacterial, fungal and vertebrate ornithine transcarbamylases (OTCs; EC 2.1.3.3), very little is known about the enzyme in plants. We report here the isolation of a T‐DNA‐tagged mutant displaying sensitivity to ornithine, whose characterization has allowed for the identification of several complementary and genomic DNA clones encoding the OTC and auxilin‐like 1 (AUL1) proteins of the crucifer Arabidopsis thaliana . Transcript mapping revealed that at least 22 bp within the OTC‐AUL1 intercoding region are transcribed from both strands, which makes this one of the rarely described cases of convergent and overlapping transcription units in the nuclear genome of a multicellular eukaryote. Transcription of the OTC gene was shown to be ubiquitous in aerial organs of adult plants, whereas that of AUL1 was obscured by the existence of a putative second copy of the gene. The OTC ‐ AUL1 locus maps at the bottom of chromosome 1.