Abstract

The progressive unraveling over the past fifteen years of the structure and function of the human mitochondrial genome, taken as a prototype of all vertebrate mitochondrial genomes, has been marked by a series of startling discoveries. The history of these developments is one in which prediction often turned out to be wrong, and in which solidly established dogmas were violated. The unique features of this genome have forced a revision of our ideas about the universality of the genetic code and of the decoding mechanism, the minimal structural requirements for rRNA, tRNA and mRNA function and the mode and control of gene expression.