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. 2014 Feb 18;5:35. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2014.00035

Figure 4.

Figure 4

Plant mitochondria maturases. Plant maturase ORFs are shown as rectangles, with different shadings indicating conserved regions. The three domains typical to group II intron encoded maturases are outlined in the maturase ORFs: A reverse transcriptase (RT); domain X, associated with maturase activity; D, DNA-binding and endonuclease domain (D/En). The organelle-encoded MatR and MatK proteins contain a well conserved domain X, but have degenerate RT motifs and lack the En domain. In angiosperms, four other maturase-related proteins, denoted as nMAT 1–4, are encoded by nuclear genes, but have N-terminal mitochondrial targeting sequences (Keren et al., 2009). Similarly to MatR, the four nMATs have a conserved domain X, but show deviations in the RT domain and lack (type I) or have deviations in the D/En domain (type II), suggesting loss of mobility functions.