Mitochondrial genomes as living 'fossils'

Abstract

The huge variation between mitochondrial genomes makes untangling their evolutionary histories difficult. Richardson et al. report on the remarkably unaltered 'fossil' genome of the tulip tree, giving us many clues as to how the mitochondrial genomes of flowering plants have evolved over the last 150 million years, and raising questions about how such extraordinary sequence conservation can be maintained.See research article http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/11/29. © 2013 Small; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.