Dinoflagellate Gene Structure and Intron Splice Sites in a Genomic Tandem Array.

Dinoflagellates are one of the last major lineages of eukaryotes for which little is known about genome structure and organization. We report here the sequence and gene structure of a clone isolated from a cosmid library which, to our knowledge, represents the largest contiguously sequenced, dinoflagellate genomic, tandem gene array. These data, combined with information from a large transcriptomic library, allowed a high level of confidence of every base pair call. This degree of confidence is not possible with PCR-based contigs. The sequence contains an intron-rich set of five highly expressed gene repeats arranged in tandem. One of the tandem repeat gene members contains an intron 26,372 bp long. This study characterizes a splice site consensus sequence for dinoflagellate introns. Two to nine base pairs around the 3' splice site are repeated by an identical two to nine base pairs around the 5' splice site. The 5' and 3' splice sites are in the same locations within each repeat so that the repeat is found only once in the mature mRNA. This identically repeated intron boundary sequence might be useful in gene modeling and annotation of genomes.

Dinoflagellate phylogeny revisited: using ribosomal proteins to resolve deep branching dinoflagellate clades.

The alveolates are composed of three major lineages, the ciliates, dinoflagellates, and apicomplexans. Together these 'protist' taxa play key roles in primary production and ecology, as well as in illness of humans and other animals. The interface between the dinoflagellate and apicomplexan clades has been an area of recent discovery, blurring the distinction between these two clades. Moreover, phylogenetic analysis has yet to determine the position of basal dinoflagellate clades hence the deepest branches of the dinoflagellate tree currently remain unresolved. Large-scale mRNA sequencing was applied to 11 species of dinoflagellates, including strains of the syndinean genera Hematodinium and Amoebophrya, parasites of crustaceans and dinoflagellates, respectively, to optimize and update the dinoflagellate tree. From the transcriptome-scale data a total of 73 ribosomal protein-coding genes were selected for phylogeny. After individual gene orthology assessment, the genes were concatenated into a >15,000 amino acid alignment with 76 taxa from dinoflagellates, apicomplexans, ciliates, and the outgroup heterokonts. Overall the tree was well resolved and supported, when the data was subsampled with gblocks or constraint trees were tested with the approximately unbiased test. The deepest branches of the dinoflagellate tree can now be resolved with strong support, and provides a clearer view of the evolution of the distinctive traits of dinoflagellates.