Figure 1.

Mitochondrial gene expression in angiosperms. The mitogenome harbors tRNAs, rRNAs, and various protein-coding genes. The flow of information from the mtDNA in flowering plants to the translation of the mRNAs involves numerous posttranscriptional steps. These include endonucleolytic processing of polycistronic transcripts, maturation of 5’ and 3’ termini, extensive RNA editing (red boxes) and group II intron splicing (marked in blue). Translation is initiated by the ribosomes assembled on the mRNAs, with organellar-encoded and imported tRNAs participating in the elongation of the polypeptide. The structure of Arabidopsis mitochondria ribosomes was modified from [97].