Chlamydomonas moewusii mitochondria. Chlamydomonas moewusii

Chlamydomonas is a genus of unicellular green algae found widely in fresh water, on damp soil, and a few occur in the sea. The cells are spherical or ellipsoidal. They have two equal flagella, present at the anterior end of the cell. The cell is surrounded by a fibrous glycoprotein cell wall. Chlamydomonas eugametos, is a commonly used laboratory species for the study of molecular genetics and photosynthesis. Complete sequence of its mitochondrial genome has been determined. It is 22,897 bp circular molecule as compared to the 15.8 kb linear mtDNA of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. They do share almost the same reduced set of coding functions but exhibit several differences, like, completely different gene order, presence of an additional gene for tRNA(met) that may be a pseudogene, transcription of all genes from the same mtDNA strand, a lower G + C content, less pronounced bias in codon usage and the absence of a reverse transcriptase-like gene homologue.