Le Q H, Turcotte K, Bureau T
Department of Biology, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1B1, Canada.
Genetics. 2001 Jul;158(3):1081-8. doi: 10.1093/genetics/158.3.1081.
Members of the Tourist family of miniature inverted-repeat transposable elements (MITEs) are very abundant among a wide variety of plants, are frequently found associated with normal plant genes, and thus are thought to be important players in the organization and evolution of plant genomes. In Arabidopsis, the recent discovery of a Tourist member harboring a putative transposase has shed new light on the mobility and evolution of MITEs. Here, we analyze a family of Tourist transposons endogenous to the genome of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (Bristol N2). One member of this large family is 7568 bp in length, harbors an ORF similar to the putative Tourist transposase from Arabidopsis, and is related to the IS5 family of bacterial insertion sequences (IS). Using database searches, we found expressed sequence tags (ESTs) similar to the putative Tourist transposases in plants, insects, and vertebrates. Taken together, our data suggest that Tourist-like and IS5-like transposons form a superfamily of potentially active elements ubiquitous to prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes.
微型反向重复转座元件（MITEs）家族中的Tourist成员在多种植物中极为丰富，常与正常植物基因相关联，因此被认为是植物基因组组织和进化中的重要参与者。在拟南芥中，最近发现的一个含有假定转座酶的Tourist成员为MITEs的移动性和进化提供了新线索。在此，我们分析了秀丽隐杆线虫（布里斯托尔N2）基因组内源性的一个Tourist转座子家族。这个大家族的一个成员长度为7568 bp，含有一个与来自拟南芥的假定Tourist转座酶相似的开放阅读框（ORF），并且与细菌插入序列（IS）的IS5家族相关。通过数据库搜索，我们在植物、昆虫和脊椎动物中发现了与假定Tourist转座酶相似的表达序列标签（ESTs）。综合来看，我们的数据表明，类似Tourist和类似IS5的转座子形成了一个潜在活跃元件的超家族，在原核生物和真核生物基因组中普遍存在。
