**Meet the editor**

Hervé Seligmann's focus on mitochondrial DNA developed when searching for molecular mechanisms explaining developmental stability in lizards, a major topic during his PhD thesis at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During subsequent appointments at the University of Chicago, University of Oslo, again in Jerusalem and at Aix-Marseille University, he described

>5 molecular processes affecting whole organism morphology and life history traits. This lead to the uncovering of several types of cryptic coding systems, which he describes for vertebrate mitochondria. These range from switches between alternative genetic codes (mainly stop codon translation), expanded codons, and several alternative transcriptions, based on systematic alterations of the template DNA (research ongoing).

Contents

**Preface VII**

**Section 1 Molecular Biology 1**

**Positions 3**

**Approaches 31**

Hervé Seligmann

Chapter 1 **True Mitochondrial tRNA Punctuation and Initiation Using**

Chapter 2 **Renaissance of the Tautomeric Hypothesis of the Spontaneous Point Mutations in DNA: New Ideas and Computational**

Chapter 3 **Directed Mutations Recode Mitochondrial Genes: From Regular**

Chapter 4 **Swinger RNAs in the Human Mitochondrial Transcriptome 79**

Chapter 5 **Expanding the Coding Potential of Vertebrate Mitochondrial Genomes: Lesson Learned from the Atlantic Cod 95**

Tor Erik Jørgensen and Steinar Daae Johansen

Montserrat Hervella and Concepcion de-la-Rua

Chapter 6 **Paleogenetics of Northern Iberian from Neolithic to**

Ol'ha O. Brovarets' and Dmytro M. Hovorun

Eric Faure and Roxane Barthélémy

**to Stopless Genetic Codes 57**

**Section 2 Phylogeny Using Mitogenomes 93**

**Chalcolithic Time 113**

Ganesh Warthi and Hervé Seligmann

**Overlapping Stop and Start Codons at Specific and Conserved**
