title: Foldback transposable elements in plants.
abstract: A novel transposon family was discovered in plants. This family, designated SoFT (Solanaceae Foldback Transposon), exhibit striking structural similarity to the 'foldback' class of animal transposons. SoFT elements consist of a middle segment surrounded by long terminal inverted repeats. Two of the identified SoFT elements have 'classical' foldback structure: their inverted repeats are divided into two domains. The outer domain consists of tandemly arranged subrepeats, whereas the inner domain is non-repetitive and AT-rich. The existence of foldback elements in plants as well as in animals suggests that long inverted repeat (foldback) transposons are ubiquitous among eukaryotes.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biological Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago 60607, USA.
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Rebatchouk
authors.forename: J O
authors.initials: JO
authors.lastname: Narita
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D004251:DNA Transposable Elements / Q000502:physiology; D004331:Drosophila melanogaster / Q000235:genetics; D017343:Genes, Plant; D018745:Genome, Plant; D007438:Introns; D018551:Solanum lycopersicum / Q000235:genetics; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D009690:Nucleic Acid Conformation; D012689:Sequence Homology, Nucleic Acid
chemical_list: D004251:DNA Transposable Elements