The ongoing international efforts of the Rice Genomic Sequencing Project have already generated a large amount of sequence data. The next important challenge will be to construct saturation mutant lines for the functional analysis of all of the genes revealed by this effort in the context of the rice plant as a whole. Recently, the endogenous retrotransposon Tos17 has been shown to be an effici...

Long terminal repeat retrotransposons (LTR elements) are ubiquitous eukaryotic transposable elements. They play important roles in the evolution of genes and genomes. Ever-growing amount of genomic sequences of many organisms present a great challenge to fast identifying them. That is the first and indispensable step to study their structure, distribution, functions and other biological impacts...

The term "C-value paradox" was coined by C. A. Thomas, Jr. in 1971 [Thomas CA (1971) Ann Rev Genetics 5:237-256] to describe the initially puzzling lack of correlation between an organism's genome size and its morphological complexity. Polyploidy and the expansion of repetitive DNA, primarily transposable elements, are two mechanisms that have since been found to account for this differential. ...

Two abundant classes of mobile elements, namely Alu and L1 elements, continue to generate new retrotransposon insertions in human genomes. Estimates suggest that these elements have generated millions of new germline insertions in individual human genomes worldwide. Unfortunately, current technologies are not capable of detecting most of these young insertions, and the true extent of germline m...

To gain information on retrotransposons in the genome of Paragonimus westermani, PCR was carried out with degenerate primers, specific to protease and reverse transcriptase (rt) genes of long-terminal-repeat (LTR) retrotransposons. The PCR products were cloned and sequenced, after which 12 different retrotransposon-related sequences were isolated from the trematode genome. These showed various ...

The Saccharomyces cerevisiae long terminal repeat retrotransposon Ty3 integrates within one or two nucleotides of the transcription initiation sites of genes transcribed by RNA polymerase III. In this study the minimal components required to re-constitute position-specific strand transfer by Ty3 integrase are defined. Ty3 integrase targeted by a synthetic fusion of RNA polymerase III transcript...

Telomeres are generally considered heterochromatic. On the basis of DNA composition, the telomeric region of Drosophila melanogaster contains two distinct subdomains: a subtelomeric region of repetitive DNA, termed TAS, and a terminal array of retrotransposons, which perform the elongation function instead of telomerase. We have identified several P-element insertions into this retrotransposon ...