Comparison of mitochondrial transcription errors in wild type and mutant mitochondrial RNA polymerase overexpression flies

To determine the error rate of mitochondrial transcription, we ananlyzed 33 and 37 million reads respectively for wild type (WT) and mutant (E423P) mitochondrial RNA polymerase (POLRMT) overexpression flies and found that the error frequency of mitochondrial transcripts were over 5 fold higher in E423P flies than that of WT. To gain more insight into the molecular mechanisms that drive the error rate of transcription by POLRMT, we examined its distribution of errors along the mitochondrial genome. We also evaluated mitochondrial RNA processing by quantifying the frequency of a single read spanning two adjacent genes. There was no significant increase of unprocessed RNAs in E423P than that of WT. These observations concluded that overexpression of E423P POLRMT in adult flies leads to a statistically significant increase of mitochondrial transcripts errors. Examination of mitochondrial transcription errors in two overexpression files.