Tc8, a Tourist-like transposon in Caenorhabditis elegans.
Members of the Tourist family of miniature inverted-repeat transposable elements (MITEs) are very abundant among a wide variety of plants, are frequently found associated with normal plant genes, and thus are thought to be important players in the organization and evolution of plant genomes. In Arabidopsis, the recent discovery of a Tourist member harboring a putative transposase has shed new light on the mobility and evolution of MITEs. Here, we analyze a family of Tourist transposons endogenous to the genome of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (Bristol N2). One member of this large family is 7568 bp in length, harbors an ORF similar to the putative Tourist transposase from Arabidopsis, and is related to the IS5 family of bacterial insertion sequences (IS). Using database searches, we found expressed sequence tags (ESTs) similar to the putative Tourist transposases in plants, insects, and vertebrates. Taken together, our data suggest that Tourist-like and IS5-like transposons form a superfamily of potentially active elements ubiquitous to prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes.
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Department of Biology, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1B1, Canada.
Turcotte
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Bureau
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D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D000818:Animals; D001483:Base Sequence; D017173:Caenorhabditis elegans / Q000235:genetics*; D004251:DNA Transposable Elements; D018509:DNA, Helminth; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D016366:Open Reading Frames; D017386:Sequence Homology, Amino Acid; D012689:Sequence Homology, Nucleic Acid; D019895:Transposases / Q000737:chemistry / Q000235:genetics
D004251:DNA Transposable Elements; D018509:DNA, Helminth; D019895:Transposases