Amplification and phylogenetic relationships of a subfamily of blood, a retrotransposable element of Drosophila.
To get a better understanding of the effect of interelement selection on the variation of long terminal repeat retrotransposon families, we have investigated the evolutionary history of blood in the Drosophila melanogaster species complex. We carried out a PCR approach to amplify the 5' untranslated region from blood in the four species of the complex. This procedure revealed two main classes of size variants. Phylogenetic analyses of nucleotide sequences from these variants and blood elements from the Drosophila Genome Projects database show that elements are grouped according to their size, so that they probably correspond to two subfamilies. These two subfamilies arose prior to the split of the complex, and several facts indicate that the expansion of one of them is leading to the competitive exclusion of the other, at least from the euchromatic regions of the genome.
Costas
J
J
Departamento de Bioloxía Fundamental, Facultade de Bioloxía, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Campus Sur s/n E-15706 Santiago de Compostela (A Coruña), Spain. bfcostas@usc.es
Valadé
E
E
Naveira
H
H
D020121:5' Untranslated Regions / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics; D000818:Animals; D001483:Base Sequence; D017931:DNA Primers / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics; D004331:Drosophila melanogaster / Q000235:genetics*; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D010802:Phylogeny; D016133:Polymerase Chain Reaction; D011110:Polymorphism, Genetic / Q000235:genetics; D018626:Retroelements; D012689:Sequence Homology, Nucleic Acid; D020079:Terminal Repeat Sequences
D020121:5' Untranslated Regions; D017931:DNA Primers; D018626:Retroelements