Evidence that a Family of Miniature Inverted-Repeat Transposable Elements (MITEs) from the Arabidopsis thaliana Genome Has Arisen from a pogo-like DNA Transposon

Abstract

Sequence similarities exist between terminal inverted repeats (TIRs) of some miniature inverted-repeat transposable element (MITE) families isolated from a wide range of organisms, including plants, insects, and humans, and TIRs of DNA transposons from the pogo family. We present here evidence that one of these MITE families, previously described for Arabidopsis thaliana, is derived from a larger element encoding a putative transposase. We have named this novel class II transposon Lemi1. We show that its putative product is related to transposases of the Tc1/mariner superfamily, being closer to the pogo family. A similar truncated element was found in a tomato DNA sequence, indicating an ancient origin and/or horizontal transfer for this family of elements. These results are reminiscent of those recently reported for the human genome, where other members of the pogo family, named Tiggers, are believed to be responsible for the generation of abundant MITE-like elements in an early primate ancestor. These results further suggest that some MITE families, which are highly reiterated in plant, insect, and human genomes, could have arisen from a similar mechanism, implicating pogo-like elements.

A Helitron-Like Transposon Superfamily from Lepidoptera Disrupts (GAAA)n Microsatellites and is Responsible for Flanking Sequence Similarity within a Microsatellite Family

“…T-biased genome sequences that are duplicated during class II mobile element insertion (target site duplications; TSDs). TAYA TSDs flank the Ades Aegypti Wukong, Jujin, and Weneng families of elements, whereas Nemo1 elements appear to target and duplicate CA sequences (Tu 1997), the Culex pipiens mimo element has TA TSDs (Feschotte and Mouchès 2000), and similarly lepidopteran MITEs from O. nubilalis (Coates et al 2009) and Helicoverpa zea (Chen and Li 2007) insert at TA genome positions. In contrast, Helitron-like TEs insert between AT or TT dinucleotides without the creation of TSDs (Kapitonov and Jurka 2001;2007b).…”

Mariner -like transposases are widespread and diverse in flowering plants

“…Few Tc1͞ mariner transposase genes are known to contain introns. Examples include Tc1-like transposons from Drosophila hydei and Caenorhabditis elegans and pogo-like elements from Drosophila melanogaster and Arabidopsis thaliana (22)(23)(24). Despite the vast number of species examined, no animal MLE transposases are known to contain introns (9).…”

msechBari, a new MITE-like element inDrosophila sechelliarelated to theBaritransposon

“…In general terms, MITE-like elements have been widely described in plants ( Moreno-Vazquez et al, 2005 ;Lin et al, 2006 ;Guermonprez et al, 2008) and specifically in grapevine (Benjak et al, 2009), maize (Bureau & Wessler, 1992;Zerjal et al, 2009), cereal grasses (Bureau & Wessler, 1994), Arabidopsis (Feschotte & Mouches, 2000), rice (Feschotte et al, 2003 ;Jiang et al, 2003 ;Nakazaki et al, 2003 ;Shan et al, 2005), Medicago (Grzebelus et al, 2007(Grzebelus et al, , 2009, apple (Han & Korban, 2007), beet (Menzel et al, 2006), barley (Lyons et al, 2008;Petersen & Seberg, 2009), grasses (Park et al, 2003), pearl millet (Remigereau et al, 2006) and pome fruit trees (Wakasa et al, 2003). Descriptions in other organisms, such as bacteria (Chen et al, 2008), cyanobacteria , fungi (Xu et al, 2010), silkworms (Han et al, 2010), fish (de Boer et al, 2007) and amphibians (Hikosaka et al, 2011) are also found in the literature, but few occurrences have been reported in the Drosophila genus (Tudor et al, 1992 ;Miller et al, 2000 ;Ortiz et al, 2010).…”