Establishing the functional links between Stowaway-like MITEs and transposases belonging to the Tc1/Mariner superfamily in the yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti.

摘要

Miniature Inverted-repeat Transposable Elements (MITEs) are a type of transposable element (TE) that lacks coding capacity. It has been established that in rice that certain Stowaway MITEs are mobilized by transposases from the Tc1/Mariner superfamily of TEs. To retrieve all Tc1/Mariner TEs from the genome, bioinformatic approaches were performed. A total of 295 Tc1/Mariner TEs that encoded a full or partial transposase were recorded which 100 were newly described. Sequence alignment, and identification of the catalytic motif placed these transposases into eight groups. A functional link was established by comparing the terminal sequences of the Stowaway-like MITEs to the termini of the terminal sequences of Tc1/Mariner TEs. A yeast excision assay was used to experimentally test these functional links. Majority of the Stowaway-like MITE and transposase combinations tested did not indicate a functional link. However, a possible functional link was observed between the AATp3-13 transposase and AAStow-5 Stowaway-like MITEs.