Discovery and characterization of the evolution variation and functions of diversity-generating retroelements using thousands of genomes and metagenomes

摘要

BackgroundDiversity-generating retroelements (DGRs) are a unique family of retroelements that generate sequence diversity of DNA to benefit their hosts by introducing variations and accelerating the evolution of target proteins. They exist widely in bacteria, archaea, phage and plasmid. However, our understanding about DGRs in natural environments was still very limited.