Shedlock A M, Okada N
Tokyo Institute of Technology, Faculty of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Yokohama, Japan.
Bioessays. 2000 Feb;22(2):148-60. doi: 10.1002/(SICI)1521-1878(200002)22:2<148::AID-BIES6>3.0.CO;2-Z.
Short interspersed repetitive elements, or SINEs, are tRNA-derived retroposons that are dispersed throughout eukaryotic genomes and can be present in well over 10(4) total copies. The enormous volume of SINE amplifications per organism makes them important evolutionary agents for shaping the diversity of genomes, and the irreversible, independent nature of their insertion allows them to be used for diagnosing common ancestry among host taxa with extreme confidence. As such, they represent a powerful new tool for systematic biology that can be strategically integrated with other conventional phylogenetic characters, most notably morphology and DNA sequences. This review covers the basic aspects of SINE evolution that are especially relevant to their use as systematic characters and describes the practical methods of characterizing SINEs for cladogram construction. It also discusses the limits of their systematic utility, clarifies some recently published misunderstandings, and illustrates the effective application of SINEs for vertebrate phylogenetics with results from selected case studies. BioEssays 22:148-160, 2000.
短散在重复元件，即SINEs，是源自tRNA的反转座子，散布于整个真核生物基因组中，总数可能超过10⁴个拷贝。每个生物体中SINEs的大量扩增使其成为塑造基因组多样性的重要进化因子，而且其插入具有不可逆、独立性，这使得它们能够被极为可靠地用于诊断宿主分类群之间的共同祖先关系。因此，它们代表了系统生物学中的一种强大新工具，可与其他传统系统发育特征（最显著的是形态学和DNA序列）进行策略性整合。本综述涵盖了SINEs进化的基本方面，这些方面与其作为系统发育特征的用途特别相关，并描述了用于构建系统发育树的SINEs特征化实用方法。它还讨论了其系统发育效用的局限性，澄清了一些最近发表的误解，并通过选定案例研究的结果说明了SINEs在脊椎动物系统发育学中的有效应用。《生物论文》22:148 - 160，2000年。
