copia-like Transposable Elements in the Drosophila Genome (original) (raw)

  1. G. M. Rubin,
  2. W. J. Brorein, Jr.,
  3. P. Dunsmuir†,
  4. A. J. Flavell‡,
  5. R. Levis*,
  6. E. Strobel§,
  7. J. J. Toole‖, and
  8. E. Young
  9. Department of Biological Chemistry, Harvard Medical School, and Sidney Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts 02115

Excerpt

A novel class of repeated sequences exists in the Drosophila melanogaster genome. Three such repeated-sequence families, 412, copia, and 297, have been studied in detail by us (Rubin et al. 1976; Finnegan et al. 1978; Potter et al. 1979; Strobel et al. 1979; Dunsmuir et al. 1980; Levis et al. 1980). The 412, copia, and 297 elements are 7-kb, 5-kb, and 6.5-kb long, respectively. Although nonhomologous in nucleotide sequence, they share the following properties: (1) Elements from each family occur at approximately 30 widely scattered locations in the chromosomes of D. melanogaster. (2) Their sequences are closely conserved and nonpermuted at each genomic location; it is in these respects that they differ markedly from certain other dispersed, moderately repetitive DNA sequences found in the D. melanogaster genome (Wensink et al. 1979). (3) 412, copia, and 297 sequences are terminally redundant, with direct repeats of 0.5 kb, 0.3 kb, and 0.4...