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Figure 2 | BMC Evolutionary Biology

Figure 2

From: The mitochondrial genome structure of Xenoturbella bocki(phylum Xenoturbellida) is ancestral within the deuterostomes

Figure 2

Structure and putative major features of the Xenoturbella control region. (A) General organization of the Xenoturbella control region (represented as a black line). Structural characters, putative elements and repeats are shown above the line, and their relative position is shown below. A repeated sequence that contains TAS elements is present at the 5' end, close to trnL. This sequence (represented by two red arrows) is able to form a short stem loop. In the central part there are 2 pairs of sequences corresponding to binding sites for the transcription factor mtTFA. The 3' region, close to the nad6 gene, is characterized by two long palindromic repeats that can form a stable, but imperfect (note the asymmetric internal loop), stem loop structure. A short region in the stem (green arrows) shows a high degree of similarity to the vertebrate Light strand origin of replication (OL). (B) The segment containing TAS elements (TACAT) consists of an almost exact 13 nucleotide repeat (red arrows). (C) Alignment of the 4 Xenoturbella mtTFA binding sites. The consensus sequence for the 4 Xenoturbella binding sites is compared to the vertebrate consensus (Xenopus laevis). (D) Alignment of a portion of the Xenoturbella 3' stem-loop to OL stem-loop sequences from a variety of vertebrate species. The two stems in Xenoturbella were inverted before alignment.

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