Is wheat mitochondrial 5S ribosomal RNA prokaryotic in nature?

Küntzel et al. (1981) (Nucleic Acids Res. 9, 1451-1461) recently concluded that the sequence of wheat mitochondrial 5S rRNA is significantly more related to prokaryotic than to eukaryotic 5S rRNA sequences, and displays an especially high affinity to that of the thermophilic Gram-negative bacterium, Thermus aquaticus. However, the sequence on which this conclusion was based, although attributed to us, differs in several places from the one determined by us. We show here that the correct sequence (Spencer, D.F., Bonen, L. and Gray, M.W. (1981) Biochemistry, in press) does not support the conclusions of Küntzel et al. about potential secondary structure in wheat mitochondrial 5S rRNA and its phylogenetic significance. We further show that when the wheat mitochondrial 5S rRNA sequence is matched against published alignments for E. coli, T. aquaticus, and wheat cytosol 5S rRNAs, the mitochondrial sequence shows no greater homology to the T. aquaticus sequence than to the E. coli sequence, and only slightly more homology to these two sequences than to wheat cytosol 5S rRNA. This analysis confirms our original view (Biochemistry, in press) that wheat mitochondrial 5S rRNA is neither obviously prokaryotic nor eukaryotic in nature, but shows characteristics of both classes of 5S rRNA, as well as some unique features.