Unusual accumulation of polymorphic microsatellite loci in a specific region of the mitochondrial genome of two mushroom-forming Agrocybe species

The cob/tRNA(Tyr) mitochondrial regions of Agrocybe aegerita and of the related species Agrocybe chaxingu display an unusual clustering of four microsatellite loci constituted by motifs of one to six nucleotides whose number of repeats varied from three to 18. In A. chaxingu, these microsatellite loci are followed by a small region bearing one additional microsatelite and one minisatellite locus constituted by an octanucleotide motif repeated 13-18 times. In A. aegerita, this latter region is deleted. This is the first evidence of such an accumulation of microsatellites in mitochondrial genomes. The analyses of the microsatellite loci in 11 A. aegerita and in four A. chaxingu wild strains have shown extensive intraspecific and interspecific variations in the number of tandem repeats (VNTRs), suggesting that these loci could represent powerful molecular markers for strain fingerprinting. Up to 23 different alleles were present in the 15 Agrocybe studied strains, allowing the definition of 12 different haplotypes.