MI70CH09-Keeling ARI 3 August 2016 18:22 ANNUAL REVIEWS Further Click here to view this article's online features: • Download figures as PPT slides • Navigate linked references • Download citations Protists and the Wild, Wild • Explore related articles • Search keywords West of Gene Expression: New Frontiers, Lawlessness, and Misfits David Roy Smith1 and Patrick J. Keeling2 1Department of Biology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5B7; email:
[email protected] 2Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Department of Botany, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z4; email:
[email protected] Annu. Rev. Microbiol. 2016. 70:161–78 Keywords First published online as a Review in Advance on constructive neutral evolution, mitochondrial transcription, plastid June 17, 2016 transcription, posttranscriptional processing, RNA editing, trans-splicing The Annual Review of Microbiology is online at micro.annualreviews.org Abstract This article’s doi: The DNA double helix has been called one of life’s most elegant structures, 10.1146/annurev-micro-102215-095448 largely because of its universality, simplicity, and symmetry. The expression Annu. Rev. Microbiol. 2016.70:161-178. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Copyright c 2016 by Annual Reviews. Access provided by University of British Columbia on 09/24/17. For personal use only. of information encoded within DNA, however, can be far from simple or All rights reserved symmetric and is sometimes surprisingly variable, convoluted, and wantonly inefficient. Although exceptions to the rules exist in certain model systems, the true extent to which life has stretched the limits of gene expression is made clear by nonmodel systems, particularly protists (microbial eukary- otes).