Article by RBI Scientists Published in Molecular Biology and Evolution
RBI Scientists Brankica Mravinac, PhD, and Miroslav Plohl, PhD, from the Laboratory of Structure and Function of Heterochromatin, Department of Molecular Biology have published a research article entitled Parallelism in Evolution of Highly Repetitive DNAs in Sibling Species. The article was published in one of the most respected journals in the field of molecular biology Molecular Biology and Evolution (IF 7.280).
This article describes two highly repetitive DNA families, which together constitute amazing 60% of the genome in the flour beetle Tribolium audax. Equivalent DNA sequences characterized in the sibling species T. madens suggest their common origin and parallel evolutionary processes in both organisms. These results favor the idea about high dynamics of recombination events in heterochromatin, which contrasts the notion about heterochromatin as a recombinationally inert chromosomal region.