Mitochondrial DNA of an African trypanosome.

The maxicircles of African trypanosome kDNA are the genetic equivalent of other mitochondrial DNAs, but the function of minicircles is unknown. The maxicircle of Trypanosoma brucei 164 encodes conventional mitochondrial gene products and is largely but not completely transcribed. Nucleotide sequence analysis of a region not found to be transcribed revealed numerous translation termination codons in all three reading frames of both strands and numerous inverted repeats, suggesting that this segment does not have polypeptide-coding function. This segment may encode a t-RNA and has a sequence resembling a consensus sequence found in mitochondrial introns, thus implying that transcript processing occurs in trypanosome mitochondria. While several cloned minicircles had distinct restriction maps reflecting T brucei minicircle heterogeneity, one segment of the minicircle contained a sequence that was conserved by minicircles from other trypanosome strains and species. Of nine mutants unable to grow as the respiring procyclic forms, seven were devoid of kDNA. The other two mutants retained normal amounts of all maxicircle restriction fragments and normal amounts of those minicircle sequences tested. Minicircle alterations probably occur in these mutants, since the kDNA does not stain with Giemsa and bands at an altered density in cesium chloride/ethidium bromide density gradients.