Mitochondrial introns aI1 and/or aI2 are needed for the in vivo deletion of intervening sequences

Abstract

Some pet^- (or mit^-) mutations impeding the splicing of one or several intron(s) of the yeast mitochondrial pre-mRNA(s) are suppressed in vivo by the DNA deletion of these introns. We have genetically demonstrated that introns aI1 and/or aI2 of the cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 gene are necessary for this deletion process. The facts that adjacent introns are simultaneously deleted and that, in the pet^- (or mit^-) mutants which easily revert by intron deletion, the splicing of the introns they affect is only partially blocked, suggest that the intron encoded proteins aI1 and/or aI2 could intervene by means of their putative reverse transcriptase activity.