Systematic identification of cargo-mobilizing genetic elements reveals new dimensions of eukaryotic diversity.

ABSTRACT: Cargo-mobilizing mobile elements (CMEs) are genetic entities that faithfully transpose diverse protein coding sequences. Although common in bacteria, we know little about eukaryotic CMEs because no appropriate tools exist for their annotation. For example, Starships are giant fungal CMEs whose functions are largely unknown because they require time-intensive manual curation. To address this knowledge gap, we developed starfish, a computational workflow for high-throughput eukaryotic CME annotation. We applied starfish to 2 899 genomes of 1 649 fungal species and found that starfish recovers known Starships with 95% combined precision and recall while expanding the number of annotated elements ten-fold. Extant Starship diversity is partitioned into 11 families that differ in their enrichmen

SUBMITTER: Gluck-Thaler E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11162782 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature