title: Characterization of a heat-activated retrotransposon in natural accessions of Arabidopsis thaliana.
abstract: Natural accessions are used for studying intraspecies genetic variation in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana in order to address fundamental questions of evolution. Transposable elements are responsible for a wide range of mutations and play significant roles in shaping a genome over evolutionary time. In the present study, we aimed to characterize ONSEN, a heat-activated long terminal repeat (LTR) retrotransposon, in natural A. thaliana accessions. Southern blot analysis demonstrated that ONSEN was present in all the studied accessions, but the copy number was diverse. Olympia-1 contained a single ONSEN copy, located in the centromere of Chromosome 3. A premature stop codon in Olympia-1 ONSEN presumably abolishes integrase activity, which in turn presumably renders the retrotransposon non-functional. Hybridization of Col-0 with Olympia-1 showed that several ONSEN copies in Col-0 were activated by heat stress and maintained their transpositional activity in the progeny.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Science, Hokkaido University.
authors.forename: Seiji
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Masuda
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Science, Hokkaido University.
authors.forename: Kosuke
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Nozawa
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Science, Hokkaido University.
authors.forename: Wataru
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Matsunaga
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Science, Hokkaido University.
authors.forename: Yukari
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Masuta
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Life Sciences, Kyoto Sangyo University.
authors.forename: Akira
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kawabe
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Science, Hokkaido University.
authors.forename: Atsushi
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kato
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Science, Hokkaido University.
authors.forename: Hidetaka
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Ito
mesh_terms: D017360:Arabidopsis / Q000235:genetics* / Q000502:physiology; D032461:Chromosomes, Plant / Q000235:genetics; D018388:Codon, Terminator; D056915:DNA Copy Number Variations; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D018869:Heat-Shock Response; D018626:Retroelements; D020079:Terminal Repeat Sequences
chemical_list: D018388:Codon, Terminator; D018626:Retroelements
keywords: Arabidopsis; ONSEN; heat stress; mutation; retrotransposon