Insertion preference of maize and rice miniature inverted repeat transposable elements as revealed by the analysis of nested elements.
A 128-bp insertion into the maize waxy-B2 allele led to the discovery of Tourist, a family of miniature inverted repeat transposable elements (MITEs). As a special category of nonautonomous elements, MITEs are distinguished by their high copy number, small size, and close association with plant genes. In maize, some Tourist elements (named Tourist-Zm) are present as adjacent or nested insertions. To determine whether the formation of multimers is a common feature of MITEs, we performed a more thorough survey, including an estimation of the proportion of multimers, with 30.2 Mb of publicly available rice genome sequence. Among the 6600 MITEs identified, >10% were present as multimers. The proportion of multimers differs for different MITE families. For some MITE families, a high frequency of self-insertions was found. The fact that all 340 multimers are unique indicates that the multimers are not capable of further amplification.
Jiang
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Department of Botany, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602, USA.
Wessler
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SR
D001483:Base Sequence; D004251:DNA Transposable Elements / Q000235:genetics*; D018744:DNA, Plant / Q000235:genetics*; D012275:Oryza / Q000235:genetics*; D016133:Polymerase Chain Reaction / Q000379:methods; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D003313:Zea mays / Q000235:genetics*
D004251:DNA Transposable Elements; D018744:DNA, Plant