title: Eukaryotic penelope-like retroelements encode hammerhead ribozyme motifs.
abstract: Small self-cleaving RNAs, such as the paradigmatic Hammerhead ribozyme (HHR), have been recently found widespread in DNA genomes across all kingdoms of life. In this work, we found that new HHR variants are preserved in the ancient family of Penelope-like elements (PLEs), a group of eukaryotic retrotransposons regarded as exceptional for encoding telomerase-like retrotranscriptases and spliceosomal introns. Our bioinformatic analysis revealed not only the presence of minimalist HHRs in the two flanking repeats of PLEs but also their massive and widespread occurrence in metazoan genomes. The architecture of these ribozymes indicates that they may work as dimers, although their low self-cleavage activity in vitro suggests the requirement of other factors in vivo. In plants, however, PLEs show canonical HHRs, whereas fungi and protist PLEs encode ribozyme variants with a stable active conformation as monomers. Overall, our data confirm the connection of self-cleaving RNAs with eukaryotic retroelements and unveil these motifs as a significant fraction of the encoded information in eukaryotic genomes.
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Biología Molecular y Celular de Plantas (UPV-CSIC), Valencia, Spain.
authors.forename: Amelia
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cervera
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Biología Molecular y Celular de Plantas (UPV-CSIC), Valencia, Spain rivero@ibmcp.upv.es.
authors.forename: Marcos
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: De la Peña
mesh_terms: D000663:Amphibians / Q000235:genetics; D000818:Animals; D001483:Base Sequence; D005075:Biological Evolution; D019295:Computational Biology; D017124:Conserved Sequence; D019281:Dimerization; D005399:Fishes / Q000235:genetics; D006801:Humans; D007313:Insecta / Q000235:genetics; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D009690:Nucleic Acid Conformation; D010944:Plants / Q000235:genetics; D016337:RNA, Catalytic / Q000737:chemistry / Q000235:genetics*; D018626:Retroelements; D012550:Schistosoma mansoni / Q000235:genetics
chemical_list: D016337:RNA, Catalytic; D018626:Retroelements; C427204:hammerhead ribozyme
keywords: LTR; RNA self-cleavage; SINE; intron; retrotransposon; telomerase