Origin and evolution of plastids and mitochondria: the phylogenetic diversity of algae

This review presents an account of the current knowledge concerning the end osymbiotic origin of plastids and mitochondria. The importance of algae as providing a large reservoir of diversified evolutionary models is emphasize d. Several reviews describing the plastidial and mitochondrial genome organ ization and gene content have been published recently. Therefore we provide a survey of the different approaches that are used to investigate the evol ution of organellar genomes since the endosymbiotic events. The importance of integrating population genetics concepts to understand better the global evolution of the cytoplasmically inherited organelles is especially emphas ized.