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MBE Advance Access originally published online on September 8, 2005
Molecular Biology and Evolution 2006 23(1):162-167; doi:10.1093/molbev/msj012
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org

Research Article

Differences in Genome Size Between Closely Related Species: The Drosophila melanogaster Species Subgroup

Matthieu Boulesteix*, Michèle Weiss{dagger} and Christian Biémont*

* Laboratoire de Biométrie et Biologie Evolutive, UMR 5558, CNRS, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Villeurbanne Cedex, France and {dagger} Centre de Génétique Moléculaire et Cellulaire, UMR 5534 CNRS, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Villeurbanne Cedex, France

E-mail: biemont{at}biomserv.univ-lyon1.fr.

Genome size varies considerably among organisms due to differences in the amplification, deletion, and divergence of various kinds of repetitive sequences, including the transposable elements, which constitute a large fraction of the genome. However, while the changes in genome size observed at a wide taxonomic level have been thoroughly investigated, we still know little about the process involved in closely related species. We estimated genome sizes and the reverse transcriptase–related sequence (RTRS) content in the nine species of the Drosophila melanogaster species subgroup. We showed that the species differ with regard to their genome size and that the RTRS content is correlated with genome size for all species except Drosophila orena. The genome of D. orena, which is 1.6-fold as big as that of D. melanogaster, has in fact not undergone any major increase in its RTRS content.

Key Words: Drosophila • genome size • phylogeny • transposable elements • satellite DNA


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