Organelle genetic systems in green algae

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Over the past several decades my laboratory has studied the evolution of genomes in green algae, the group from which land plants arose. The main focus of our work is on organelle genomes, i.e., those in mitochondria and chloroplasts, the sites of respiration and photosynthesis, respectively; the presence of genomes in mitochondria and chloroplasts is normally essential to the functioning of these organelles. The overriding theme of our efforts has been to document and explain the diversity of organelle genome features, like intact vs. fragmented; circular vs. linear, GC-rich vs. AT-rich, and compact vs. bloated (i.e., high vs. low fraction of the genome has a coding function). The proposed work for the next grant period focuses on three main activities: (1) testing the mutational-burden hypothesis as an explanation for the compactness variation in mitochondrial, chloroplast and nuclear genomes in selected unicellular green algal species;