There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
Mitoviruses replicate in mitochondria of their host fungi. They have small RNA genomes
that encompass a single ORF encoding the viral RdRp. Since UGA codons encode Trp in
fungal mitochondria, the RdRp ORF of a typical mitovirus includes multiple UGA codons.
In some mitoviruses, however, the ORF has no such codons, suggesting that these particular
viruses may be under selective pressure to exclude them. In this report, new evidence
is presented that host fungi whose mitoviruses have no or few UGA codons are distinctive
in also having no or few UGA codons in their core mitochondrial genes. Thus, the relative
exclusion of such codons in a subset of mitoviruses appears to reflect most fundamentally
that UGA(Trp) is a rare mitochondrial codon in their particular hosts. The fact that
UGA(Trp) is a rare mitochondrial codon in many fungi appears not to have been widely
discussed to date.