Evidence for strong co-evolution of mitochondrial and somatic genomes

TL;DR

This study demonstrates a strong correlation between mitochondrial genome composition and the phylogenetic taxonomy of their hosts, indicating significant co-evolution between mitochondrial and somatic genomes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis linking mitochondrial genome triplet frequency clusters with host taxonomy, revealing evidence of co-evolution.

Findings

Genomes cluster in 63-dimensional frequency space with taxonomy correlation

Strong co-evolution evidenced by correlation between mitochondrial and host phylogeny

Clustering method reveals regular distribution of genomes among taxonomic groups

Abstract

We studied a relations between the triplet frequency composition of mitochondria genomes, and the phylogeny of their bearers. First, the clusters in 63dimensional space were developed due to $K$-means. Second, the clade composition of those clusters has been studied. It was found that genomes are distributed among the clusters very regularly, with strong correlation to taxonomy. Strong co-evolution manifests through this correlation: the proximity in frequency space was determined over the mitochondrion genomes, while the proximity in taxonomy was determined morphologically.