Rapid evolution at the Drosophila telomere: transposable element dynamics at an intrinsically unstable locus.

ABSTRACT: Drosophila telomeres have been maintained by three families of active transposable elements (TEs), HeT-A, TAHRE, and TART, collectively referred to as HTTs, for tens of millions of years, which contrasts with an unusually high degree of HTT interspecific variation. While the impacts of conflict and domestication are often invoked to explain HTT variation, the telomeres are unstable structures such that neutral mutational processes and evolutionary tradeoffs may also drive HTT evolution. We leveraged population genomic data to analyze nearly 10,000 HTT insertions in 85  Drosophila melanogaster genomes and compared their variation to other more typical TE families. We observe that occasional large-scale copy number expansions of both HTTs and other TE families occur, highlighting that the HT

SUBMITTER: McGurk MP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8045721 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature