Transmission of yeast mitochondrial loci to progeny is reduced when nearby intergenic regions containing ori sequences are deleted.

Mitochondrial DNAs (mtDNA) from four stable revertant strains generated from high frequency petite forming strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae have been shown to contain deletions which have eliminated intergenic sequences encompassing ori1, ori2 and ori7. The deleted sequences are dispensable for expression of the respiratory phenotype and mutant strains exhibit the same relative amount of mtDNA per cell as the wild-type (wt) parental strain. These deletion mutants were also used to study the influence of particular intergenic sequences on the transmission of closely linked mitochondrial loci. When the mutant strains were crossed with the parental wt strains, there was a strong bias towards the transmission into the progeny of mitochondrial genomes lacking the intergenic deletions. The deficiency in the transmission of the mutant regions was not a simple function of deletion length and varied between different loci. In crosses between mutant strains which had non-overlapping deletions, wt mtDNA molecules were formed by recombination. The wt recombinants were present at high frequencies among the progeny of such crosses, but recombinants containing both deletions were not detected at all. The results indicate that mitochondrial genomes can be selectively transmitted to progeny and that two particular intergenic regions positively influence transmission. Within these regions other sequences in addition to ori/rep affect transmission.