Soybean Recombination Sites are Present as Dispersed Segments in Arabidopsis and Liverwort Mitochondrial DNA

In previous studies we have shown that recombination across a 299-bp interspersed sequence accounts for the diversity of the mitochondrial genome in wild and cultivated soybeans. In this study, a computer-assisted survey of databases was performed using sequences of the repeat and its neighboring regions as query sequences. The sequences of soybean were found to be present as many short segments that include repeated sequences in the mitochondrial genomes of Arabidopsis and liverwort. Taken together with the results of a DNA gel-blot analysis, this suggests that the soybean sequences were found to have originated during land plant evolution and are present as small-interspersed segments in many taxa of land plants.