title: Widespread interspecific divergence in cis-regulation of transposable elements in the Arabidopsis genus.
abstract: Transposable elements (TEs) are so abundant and variable that they count among the most important mutational sources in genomes. Nonetheless, little is known about the genetics of their variation in activity or silencing across closely related species. Here, we demonstrate that regulation of TE genes can differ dramatically between the two closely related Arabidopsis species A. thaliana and A. lyrata. In leaf and floral tissues of F1 interspecific hybrids, about 47% of TEs show allele-specific expression, with the A. lyrata copy being generally expressed at higher level. We confirm that TEs are generally expressed in A. lyrata but not in A. thaliana. Allele-specific differences in TE expression are associated with divergence in epigenetic modifications like DNA and histone methylation between species as well as with sequence divergence. Our data demonstrate that A. thaliana silences TEs much better than A. lyrata. For long terminal repeat retrotransposons, these differences are more pronounced for younger insertions. Interspecific differences in TE silencing may have a great impact on genome size changes.
authors.affiliation: Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Cologne, Germany.
authors.forename: Fei
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: He
authors.forename: Xu
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Jin-Yong
authors.initials: JY
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.forename: Franziska
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Turck
authors.forename: Xue
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Dong
authors.forename: Ulrike
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Goebel
authors.forename: Justin O
authors.initials: JO
authors.lastname: Borevitz
authors.forename: Juliette
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: de Meaux
mesh_terms: D017360:Arabidopsis / Q000235:genetics*; D047369:Chromatin Immunoprecipitation; D019295:Computational Biology; D003433:Crosses, Genetic; D004251:DNA Transposable Elements / Q000235:genetics*; D035264:Flowers / Q000378:metabolism; D018506:Gene Expression Regulation, Plant / Q000235:genetics*; D023281:Genomics; D046228:Microarray Analysis; D018515:Plant Leaves / Q000378:metabolism; D013045:Species Specificity
chemical_list: D004251:DNA Transposable Elements