A fundamental paradox motivates the study of plant mitochondrial genomics: the mutation rate is very low (lower than in the nucleus) but the rearrangement rate is high. A landmark paper published in Journal of Molecular Evolution in 1988 established these facts and revealed the paradox. Jeffrey Palmer and Laura Herbon did a prodigious amount of work in the pre-genome sequencing era to identify both the high frequency of rearrangements between closely related species, and the low frequency of mutations, observations that have now been confirmed many times by sequencing. This paper was also the first to use molecular data on rearrangements as a phylogenetic trait to build a parsimonious tree. The work was a technical tour-de-force, its findings are still at the heart of plant mitochondrial genomics, and the underlying molecular mechanisms that produce this paradox are still not completely understood.

一个基本的悖论激发了植物线粒体基因组学的研究：突变率非常低（低于细胞核），但重排率很高。发表在Journal of Molecular Evolution上的里程碑式论文1988 年确立了这些事实并揭示了悖论。杰弗里·帕尔默 (Jeffrey Palmer) 和劳拉·赫本 (Laura Herbon) 在前基因组测序时代做了大量工作，以确定密切相关物种之间重排的高频率和突变的低频率，这些观察结果现已通过测序多次证实。这篇论文也是第一个使用重排的分子数据作为系统发育特征来构建简约树的论文。这项工作是一项技术巡回演出，其发现仍然是植物线粒体基因组学的核心，产生这种悖论的潜在分子机制仍未完全了解。