Institut de Biologie de l'École Normale Supérieure, CNRS, INSERM, Paris, France.
Biology Department, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA.
Sci Adv. 2024 Sep 20;10(38):eado9461. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.ado9461.
Transposable elements (TEs) can alter host gene structure and expression, whereas host organisms develop mechanisms to repress TE activities. In the nematode , a small interfering RNA pathway dependent on the helicase ERI-6/7 primarily silences retrotransposons and recent genes of likely viral origin. By studying gene expression variation among wild strains, we found that structural variants and transposon remnants likely underlie expression variation in and the pathway targets. We further found that multiple insertions of the DNA transposons, reshuffled the locus and induced inversion of in some wild strains. In the inverted configuration, gene function was previously shown to be repaired by unusual trans-splicing mediated by direct repeats. We identified that these direct repeats originated from terminal inverted repeats of . Our findings highlight the role of host-transposon interactions in driving rapid host genome diversification among natural populations and shed light on evolutionary novelty in genes and splicing mechanisms.
转座元件 (TEs) 可以改变宿主基因的结构和表达，而宿主生物则会发展出抑制 TE 活性的机制。在线虫中，一种依赖于解旋酶 ERI-6/7 的小干扰 RNA 途径主要沉默逆转录转座子和可能具有病毒起源的新基因。通过研究野生种群之间的基因表达变异，我们发现结构变异和转座子残片可能是 和途径靶标表达变异的基础。我们进一步发现，DNA 转座子的多次插入打乱了 基因座，并在一些野生菌株中诱导了 的倒位。在倒位构型中，先前的研究表明，基因功能是通过由直接重复介导的异常的反式剪接来修复的。我们确定这些直接重复来自 的末端反向重复序列。我们的研究结果强调了宿主-转座子相互作用在驱动自然种群中宿主基因组快速多样化方面的作用，并揭示了基因和剪接机制中的进化新颖性。
