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MBE Advance Access originally published online on June 9, 2004
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Mol. Biol. Evol. 21(9):1769-1780. 2004
DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msh188
© 2004 by the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. ISSN: 0737-4038

Merlin, a New Superfamily of DNA Transposons Identified in Diverse Animal Genomes and Related to Bacterial IS1016 Insertion Sequences

Cédric Feschotte1

Departments of Plant Biology and Genetics, The University of Georgia, Athens

E-mail: cedric{at}plantbio.uga.edu.

Several new families of DNA transposons were identified by computer-assisted searches in a wide range of animal species that includes nematodes, flat worms, mosquitoes, sea squirt, zebrafish, and humans. Many of these elements have coding capacity for transposases, which are related to each other and to those encoded by the IS1016 group of bacterial insertion sequences. Although these transposases display a motif similar to the DDE motif found in many transposases and integrases, they cannot be directly allied to any of the previously described eukaryotic transposases. Other common features of the new eukaryotic and bacterial transposons include similarities in their terminal inverted repeats and 8-bp or 9-bp target-site duplications. Together, these data indicate that these elements belong to a new superfamily of DNA transposons, called Merlin/IS1016, which is common in many eubacterial and animal genomes. We also present evidence that these transposons have been recently active in several animal species. This evidence is particularly strong in the parasitic blood fluke Schistosoma mansoni, in which Merlin is also the first described DNA transposon family.

Key Words: Transposable elements • DNA transposons • transposase • insertion sequences • IS1016.


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