Multiple effects govern endogenous retrovirus survival patterns in human gene introns.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) and solitary long terminal repeats (LTRs) have a significant antisense bias when located in gene introns, suggesting strong negative selective pressure on such elements oriented in the same transcriptional direction as the enclosing gene. It has been assumed that this bias reflects the presence of strong transcriptional regulatory signals within LTRs but little work has been done to investigate this phenomenon further.

Results

In the analysis reported here, we found significant differences between individual human ERV families in their prevalence within genes and degree of antisense bias and show that, regardless of orientation, ERVs of most families are less likely to be found in introns than in intergenic regions. Examination of de

SUBMITTER: van de Lagemaat LN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1794541 | biostudies-literature | 2006

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature