Abstract
Two copies of nonmobile retrotransposon localized in D. melanogaster heterochromatin (mdg1 het) were sequenced at the 3′-end. The comparison of 2.5-kb mdg1 hetsequences with the sequence of cognate euchomatic transposable copies (mdg1 tr) revealed an intact mdg1 ORF2 encoding the pol gene in mdg1 het, and two-thirds of nucleotide substitutions in this ORF were synonymous. All the known mdg1 regulatory elements in the mdg1 hetLTR also are conserved, in spite of numerous deletions and nucleotide substitutions elsewhere in this region. These data suggest that the mdg1 hetsubfamily lost its mobility more recently than other functions were lost. The G→A hypermutation known to occur in the reverse transcription cycle of retroviruses was detected in one mdg1 hetcopy. The structure of the enchancerlike region in mdg1 hetsuggests a reduced transcription level and, therefore, transposition frequency, relative to mdg1 tr. The number of nucleotide substitutions suggests that the time of mdg1 hetmobility loss was less than 0.3–0.5 Myr ago.
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Nurminsky, D.I. Two subfamilies of MDG1 retrotransposon with different evolutionary histories in D. melanogaster . J Mol Evol 37, 496–503 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00160430
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00160430