Since 2007, the annual green tide disaster in the Yellow Sea has brought serious economic losses to China. There is no research on the genetic similarities of four constituent species of green tide algae at the genomic level. We previously determined the mitochondrial genomes of Ulva prolifera, Ulva linza and Ulva flexuosa. In the present work, the mitochondrial genome of another green tide (Ulva compressa) was sequenced and analyzed. With the length of 62,311 bp, it contained 29 encoding genes, 26 tRNAs and 10 open reading frames. By comparing these four mitochondrial genomes, we found that U. compressa was quite different from the other three types of Ulva species. However, there were similarities between U. prolifera and U. linza in the number, distribution and homology of open reading frames, evolutionary and codon variation of tRNA, evolutionary relationship and selection pressure of coding genes. Repetitive sequence analysis of simple sequence repeats, tandem repeat and forward repeats further supposed that they have evolved from the same origin. In addition, we directly analyzed gene homologies and translocation of four green tide algae by Mauve alignment. There were gene order rearrangements among them. With fast-evolving genomes, these four green algal mitochondria have both conservatism and variation, thus opening another window for the understanding of origin and evolution of Ulva.
Keywords: Aquaculture; Chlorophyta; Encoding gene; Gene order rearrangement; Open reading frame; Ulva compressa; Ulvaceae.