MBE Advance Access originally published online on December 1, 2004
Molecular Biology and Evolution 2005 22(3):776-783; doi:10.1093/molbev/msi063
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Research Article |
Naturally Occurring Transposable Elements Disrupt hsp70 Promoter Function in Drosophila melanogaster

* Committee on Evolutionary Biology and Department of Organismal Biology & Anatomy, The University of Chicago;
Committees on Genetics and Molecular Medicine and Department of Organismal Biology & Anatomy, The University of Chicago
E-mail: m-feder{at}uchicago.edu.
Naturally occurring transposable element (TE) insertions that disrupt Drosophila promoters are correlated with modified promoter function and are posited to play a significant role in regulatory evolution, but their phenotypes have not been established directly. To establish the functional consequences of these TE insertions, we created constructs with either TE-bearing or TE-lacking hsp70 promoters fused to a luciferase reporter gene and assayed luciferase luminescence in transiently transfected Drosophila cells. Each of the four TEs reduces luciferase signal after heat shock and heat inducibility of the hsp70 promoter. To test if the differences in hsp70 promoter activity are TE-sequence dependent, we replaced each of the TEs with multiple intergenic sequences of equal length. These replacement insertions similarly reduced luciferase signal, suggesting that the TEs affect hsp70 promoter function by altering promoter architecture. These results are consistent with differences in Hsp70 expression levels, inducible thermotolerance, and fecundity previously associated with the TEs. That two different varieties of TEs in two different hsp70 genes have common effects suggests that TE insertion represents a general mechanism through which selection manipulates hsp70 gene expression.
Key Words: transposable element hsp70 promoter transcriptional regulation gene expression
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