LINE-1-like retrotransposons contribute to RNA-based gene duplication in dicots.
RNA-based duplicated genes or functional retrocopies (retrogenes) are known to drive phenotypic evolution. Retrogenes emerge via retroposition, which is mainly mediated by long interspersed nuclear element 1 (LINE-1 or L1) retrotransposons in mammals. By contrast, long terminal repeat (LTR) retrotransposons appear to be the major player in plants, although an L1-like mechanism has also been hypothesized to be involved in retroposition. We tested this hypothesis by searching for young retrocopies, as these still retain the sequence features associated with the underlying retroposition mechanism. Specifically, we identified polymorphic retrocopies (retroCNVs) by analyzing public Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) resequencing data. Furthermore, we searched for recently originated retrocopies encoded by the reference genome of Arabidopsis and Manihot esculenta. Across these two datasets, we found cases with L1-like hallmarks, namely, the expected target site sequence, a polyA tail and target site duplications. Such data suggest that an L1-like mechanism could operate in plants, especially dicots.
School of Life Sciences, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400044, China.
Zhenglin
Z
Zhu
Key Laboratory of the Zoological Systematics and Evolution &State Key Laboratory of Integrated Management of Pest Insects and Rodents, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.
Shengjun
S
Tan
Key Laboratory of the Zoological Systematics and Evolution &State Key Laboratory of Integrated Management of Pest Insects and Rodents, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.
Yaqiong
Y
Zhang
Key Laboratory of the Zoological Systematics and Evolution &State Key Laboratory of Integrated Management of Pest Insects and Rodents, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.|University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
Yong E
YE
Zhang
D017360:Arabidopsis / Q000235:genetics; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D020440:Gene Duplication; D023061:Gene Order; D018745:Genome, Plant; D020084:Long Interspersed Nucleotide Elements; D012313:RNA / Q000235:genetics*; D018626:Retroelements; D064028:Tracheophyta / Q000235:genetics*
D018626:Retroelements; D012313:RNA