Widespread evidence for horizontal transfer of transposable elements across Drosophila genomes.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Horizontal transfer (HT) could play an important role in the long-term persistence of transposable elements (TEs) because it provides them with the possibility to avoid the checking effects of host-silencing mechanisms and natural selection, which would eventually drive their elimination from the genome. However, despite the increasing evidence for HT of TEs, its rate of occurrence among the TE pools of model eukaryotic organisms is still unknown.

Results

We have extracted and compared the nucleotide sequences of all potentially functional autonomous TEs present in the genomes of Drosophila melanogaster, D. simulans and D. yakuba - 1,436 insertions classified into 141 distinct families - and show that a large fraction of the families found in two or more species d

SUBMITTER: Bartolome C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2688281 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature