Pervasive, Genome-Wide Transcription in the Organelle Genomes of Diverse Plastid-Bearing Protists

Organelle genomes are among the most sequenced kinds of chromosome. This is largely because they are small and widely used in molecular studies, but also because next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies made sequencing easier, faster, and cheaper. However, studies of organelle RNA have not kept pace with those of DNA, despite huge amounts of freely available eukaryotic RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) data. Little is known about organelle transcription in non-model species, and most of the available eukaryotic RNA-seq data have not been mined for organelle transcripts. Here, we use publicly available RNA-seq experiments to investigate organelle transcription in 30 diverse plastid-bearing protists with varying organelle genomic architectures. Mapping RNA-seq data to organelle genomes revealed pervasive, genome-wide transcription, regardless of the taxonomic grouping, gene organization, or non-coding content. For every species analyzed, transcripts covered at least 85% of the mitochondrial and/or plastid genomes (all of which were ≤ 105 kb), indicating that most of the organelle DNA-coding and non-coding-is transcriptionally active. These results follow earlier studies of model species showing that organellar transcription is coupled and ubiquitous across the genome, requiring significant downstream processing of polycistronic transcripts. Our findings suggest that non-coding organelle DNA can be transcriptionally active, raising questions about the underlying function of these transcripts and underscoring the utility of publicly available RNA-seq data for recovering complete genome sequences. If pervasive transcription is also found in bigger organelle genomes (>105 kb) across a broader range of eukaryotes, this could indicate that non-coding organelle RNAs are regulating fundamental processes within eukaryotic cells.

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