A novel chimeric gene, siren, with retroposed promoter sequence in the Drosophila bipectinata complex.
Retrotransposons often produce a copy of host genes by their reverse transcriptase activity operating on host gene transcripts. Since transcripts normally do not contain promoter, a retroposed gene copy usually becomes a retropseudogene. However, in Drosophila bipectinata and a closely related species we found a new chimeric gene, whose promoter was likely produced by retroposition. This chimeric gene, named siren, consists of a tandem duplicate of Adh and a retroposed fragment of CG11779 containing the promoter and a partial intron in addition to the first exon. We found that this unusual structure of a retroposed fragment was obtained by retroposition of nanos, which overlaps with CG11779 on the complementary strand. The potential of retroposition to produce a copy of promoter and intron sequences in the context of gene overlapping was demonstrated.
Nozawa
Masafumi
M
Department of Biological Sciences, Graduate School of Science, Tokyo Metropolitan University, 1-1 Minami-ohsawa, Hachioji-shi, Tokyo 192-0397, Japan.
Aotsuka
Tadashi
T
Tamura
Koichiro
K
D000426:Alcohol Dehydrogenase; D000429:Alcohol Oxidoreductases / Q000235:genetics; D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D000818:Animals; D001483:Base Sequence; D003001:Cloning, Molecular; D004330:Drosophila / Q000235:genetics*; D029721:Drosophila Proteins / Q000235:genetics; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D008040:Genetic Linkage; D008957:Models, Genetic; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D050506:Mutant Chimeric Proteins / Q000235:genetics*; D010802:Phylogeny; D011401:Promoter Regions, Genetic / Q000235:genetics*; D016601:RNA-Binding Proteins / Q000235:genetics; D018626:Retroelements / Q000235:genetics*; D020133:Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA
D029721:Drosophila Proteins; D050506:Mutant Chimeric Proteins; D016601:RNA-Binding Proteins; D018626:Retroelements; C070574:nos protein, Drosophila; D000429:Alcohol Oxidoreductases; C073796:ADH protein, Drosophila; D000426:Alcohol Dehydrogenase