Finding. An Amazonian palm mitochondrial genome is now closed at 1,268,308 base pairs. Soler, Bacon and colleagues assemble Euterpe precatoria from PacBio HiFi reads and then do the unglamorous work: manual graph tracing through a recombination tangle. Coverage is about 746-fold. Annotation finds 76 unique genes hiding in 177 features, because palms copy and break mitochondrial genes. Forty-one protein-coding genes, 32 tRNAs, three rRNAs. Public palm mitogenomes were three. Now they are four.
Why this paper matters
Angiosperm mtDNA is a structural problem, not a gene-content problem. Palms make that problem worse. A HiFi graph that admits the recombination instead of pretending a single circle is the right kind of resource. If you compare plant mitochondrial expansion, you needed this species.
What they actually measured
Long-read assembly, curation, annotation, coverage. No respiratory assay.
How to read the score
Low 60s on a mitochondria-importance rubric. High-quality plant mtDNA resource. Confidence is high for the assembly claim.
Caveats
One tree. No editing map. Do not invent a palm mitochondrial disease.
What to do with it
Download the 1.27 Mb sequence and align across the four palm mitogenomes. If you came for human OXPHOS, stop here.