A partial nucleotide sequence analysis of cicer arietinum chloroplast genome

To investigate some structural and evolutionary aspects of Cicer arietinum chloroplast genome, 6.0 kb chloroplast DNA fragment from C.arietinum chloroplast genomic library was partially sequenced. The total length of sequenced DNA fragments is 2500 bp. To detect possible coding re- glens the C.arietinum DNA sequenced fragments were comparised with known whole chloroplast DNA sequen- ces of rice, maize and tobacco from GenBank. The ana- lysis revealed that, the sequenced C.arietinum DNA frag- ments contain the whole tRNAAn(GUU) gene, 5′end of,4.5S rRNA, 3′ends of petA and tobacco ORF512 homo- logue, inner part of psa I. Comparitive analysis of these genes/gene fragments of C.arietinum, rice, maize and tobac- co, shows for pet A and 4.5S rRNA genes of C.arietinum a higher homology with the tobacco genes (92% and 94%, respectively) than with the same genes from rice and maize (80% and 82%, 88% and 80%, respectively). At last, taking into consideration the unlinking of petA and 4.5S rRNA genes to each other (they are separated by about 40 kb) in the genomes of tobacco, rice and maize, of some interest is also that, these genes of C.arietinum are located in the same genome region (separated by, at most, 5 kb),ProbabIy, during the evolution the genome rearrangement has took place by the translocation of one of these genes close to other.