A circle graph is the intersection graph of a set of chords in a circle. Keil [Discrete Appl. Math., 42(1):51-63, 1993] proved that DOMINATING SET, CONNECTED DOMINATING SET, and TOTAL DOMINATING SET are NP-complete in circle graphs. To the best of our knowledge, nothing was known about the param-eterized complexity of these problems in circle graphs. In this paper we prove the following results, which contribute in this direction: A preliminary conference version of this work appeared in the Theory Comput Syst • DOMINATING SET, INDEPENDENT DOMINATING SET, CONNECTED DOMINATING SET, TOTAL DOMINATING SET, and ACYCLIC DOMINATING SET are W [1]-hard in circle graphs, parameterized by the size of the solution. • Whereas both CONNECTED DOMINATING SET and ACYCLIC DOMINATING SET are W [1]-hard in circle graphs, it turns out that CONNECTED ACYCLIC DOMINATING SET is polynomial-time solvable in circle graphs. • If T is a given tree, deciding whether a circle graph G has a dominating set inducing a graph isomorphic to T is NP-complete when T is in the input, and FPT when parameterized by t = |V (T)|. We prove that the FPT algorithm runs in subexpo-nential time, namely 2 O(t· log log t log t) · n O(1) , where n = |V (G)|.