Institution: | a Institute of Molecular Biology, Academia Sinica, Nankang, Taipei, 11529, Taiwan, China b Institute of Oceanography, National Taiwan University, Taipei, 10764, Taiwan, China c Department of Biological Sciences, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD 21228, U.S.A. d Center of Marine Biotechnology, University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, Baltimore, MD 21202, U.S.A. |
Abstract: | In Gracilaria tenuistipitata, a highly differentiated multicellular member of the marine red algae, Rhodophyta, chloroplast (cp) DNA can be separated as a satellite band from the nuclear DNA in a CsCl gradient. Using a heterologous probe from Chlamydomonas, the ribosomal protein-encoding gene, rpl16, was located on a 4.5-kb EcoRI fragment of cp DNA. The fragment was cloned and a 1365-bp region around rpl16 was sequenced. The gene order around rpl16, 5′ rpl22-rps3-rpl16, is identical to that detected in the chloroplast DNA of liverwort, tobacco and maize. Both the nucleotide sequence and the amino-acid sequence of rpl16 are more conserved than that of rps3. The rpl16 gene contains no intron, a feature which shows more similarity to the unicellular green algae, Chlamydomonas, than the other land plants. Sequences that may form a stable stem-loop structure were detected within the coding sequence of rpl16. |