Bureau T E, Wessler S R
Botany Department, University of Georgia, Athens 30602.
Plant Cell. 1992 Oct;4(10):1283-94. doi: 10.1105/tpc.4.10.1283.
The wx-B2 mutation results from a 128-bp transposable element-like insertion in exon 11 of the maize Waxy gene. Surprisingly, 11 maize genes and one barley gene in the GenBank and EMBL data bases were found to contain similar elements in flanking or intron sequences. Members of this previously undescribed family of elements, designated Tourist, are short (133 bp on average), have conserved terminal inverted repeats, are flanked by a 3-bp direct repeat, and display target site specificity. Based on estimates of repetitiveness of three Tourist elements in maize genomic DNA, the copy number of the Tourist element family may exceed that of all previously reported eukaryotic inverted repeat elements. Taken together, our data suggest that Tourist may be the maize equivalent of the human Alu family of elements with respect to copy number, genomic dispersion, and the high frequency of association with genes.
wx - B2突变是由一个128碱基对的类转座元件插入到玉米蜡质基因的第11外显子中导致的。令人惊讶的是,在GenBank和EMBL数据库中发现11个玉米基因和1个大麦基因在侧翼或内含子序列中含有相似元件。这个以前未描述的元件家族成员被命名为“游客”元件,它们很短(平均133碱基对),具有保守的末端反向重复序列,两侧有一个3碱基对的正向重复序列,并表现出靶位点特异性。根据对玉米基因组DNA中三个“游客”元件重复率的估计,“游客”元件家族的拷贝数可能超过所有先前报道的真核生物反向重复元件。综上所述,我们的数据表明,就拷贝数、基因组分散性以及与基因关联的高频率而言,“游客”元件可能相当于人类的Alu元件家族。