Molecular Biology and Evolution 18:443-447 (2001)
© 2001 Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution
LETTER |
An Unusual Vertebrate LTR Retrotransposon from the Cod Gadus morhua
Department of Biochemistry, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
The pursuit of genome sequencing projects has added impetus to the discovery and analysis of the repetitive DNA sequences that are present in all eukaryotes. Much interest has been focused on retroelements, elements propagated via an RNA intermediate, as these are the most abundant form of repetitive DNA in eukaryote genomes. One class of these elements is the retrotransposons, which can further be subdivided into two major groups: those that possess long terminal repeats (LTRs) and those that do not. The LTR retrotransposons contain open reading frames (ORFs) which encode the proteins (GAG and POL) required for the reverse transcription of the element mRNA and integration of the resulting cDNA into the host genome. The classification of LTR retroelements is currently under intense analysis, and several schemes have recently been proposed (Bowen and McDonald 1999
; Hull 1999
; Pringle 1999
; Cook et al. 2000
).
The phylogenetic analyses
Footnotes
literature cited