The protist Euglena sp. (scale bar 25 µm)WIKIMEDIA, ROGELIO MORENOI just finished reviewing another mitochondrial genome paper. These days, the mitochondrial genome review requests are arriving faster than I can turn them out. Indeed, in 2014 alone, more than a thousand new mitochondrial genome sequences were deposited in GenBank—an almost 15 percent increase from the previous year.
Few would question the utility of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) as a genetic marker. But it is increasingly clear that sequencing mtDNA has become an easy route to peer-reviewed publications; at times, the pursuit of these publications is encumbering journal editors, referees, and the research infrastructure as a whole. Is publishing papers on mitochondrial genomes a relic of the “publish or perish” academic landscape? Should mtDNA sequences go directly into GenBank? Are we still gaining new and significant insights from mitochondrial genome data?
Importance of mtDNA
The first non-viral genome to be completely sequenced, in 1981, was human mtDNA, which built momentum towards a nuclear genome project. By the early 1990s, dozens of other mtDNAs had been decoded, including ones from land plants and protists, which ...
