Plant Genome Evolution
Alan Schulman
Inst. of Biotechnology, University of Helsinki Helsinki, Finland
Plant genomes are a mosaic of genes and families of repetitive entities not generally thought of as genes. The
repetitive units include retrotransposons of several distinct types, which do, however, encode protein products,
which are expressed. Many of these are "selfish" in the sense of being self-contained replicating units. In
order to understand plant genome evolution, we must think not only about sequence change in the classical
genes, but also come to grips with the genomic ecology and population biology of the vast number of active
repetitive elements which comprise 95% of the DNA in most eukaryotic organisms.