- THIS ARTICLE
- Full Text
- Full Text (PDF)
- Data Supplement
-
All Versions of this Article:
genetics.106.061861v1
178/1/573 most recent - Alert me when this article is cited
- Alert me if a correction is posted
- SERVICES
- Email this article to a friend
- Similar articles in this journal
- Similar articles in PubMed
- Alert me to new issues of the journal
- Download to citation manager
- Reprints & Permissions
- CITING ARTICLES
- Citing Articles via HighWire
- Citing Articles via Google Scholar
- GOOGLE SCHOLAR
- Articles by Abrusán, G.
- Articles by Warburton, P. E.
- Search for Related Content
- PUBMED
- PubMed Citation
- Articles by Abrusán, G.
- Articles by Warburton, P. E.
Originally published as Genetics Published Articles Ahead of Print on October 18, 2007.
Genetics, Vol. 178, 573-581, January 2008, Copyright © 2008
doi:10.1534/genetics.106.061861
Biased Distributions and Decay of Long Interspersed Nuclear Elements in the Chicken Genome
György Abrusán*,
,1,
Hans-Jürgen Krambeck*,
Thomas Junier
,
Joti Giordano and
Peter E. Warburton
* Department of Ecophysiology, Max Planck Institute of Limnology, 24306 Plön, Germany, Computational Evolutionary Genetics Group 1211, University of Geneva, Geneva 4, Switzerland and Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, New York 10029
1 Corresponding author: Laboratory of Aquatic Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Department of Biology, Catholic University of Leuven, Ch. Deberiotstraat 32, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.
E-mail: gyorgy.abrusan{at}bio.kuleuven.be
The genomes of birds are much smaller than mammalian genomes, and transposable elements (TEs) make up only 10% of the chicken genome, compared with the 45% of the human genome. To study the mechanisms that constrain the copy numbers of TEs, and as a consequence the genome size of birds, we analyzed the distributions of LINEs (CR1's) and SINEs (MIRs) on the chicken autosomes and Z chromosome. We show that (1) CR1 repeats are longest on the Z chromosome and their length is negatively correlated with the local GC content; (2) the decay of CR1 elements is highly biased, and the 5'-ends of the insertions are lost much faster than their 3'-ends; (3) the GC distribution of CR1 repeats shows a bimodal pattern with repeats enriched in both AT-rich and GC-rich regions of the genome, but the CR1 families show large differences in their GC distribution; and (4) the few MIRs in the chicken are most abundant in regions with intermediate GC content. Our results indicate that the primary mechanism that removes repeats from the chicken genome is ectopic exchange and that the low abundance of repeats in avian genomes is likely to be the consequence of their high recombination rates.
This article has been cited by other articles:
 |
|
 |
|
  G. E. Liu, L. Jiang, F. Tian, B. Zhu, and J. Song Calibration of Mutation Rates Reveals Diverse Subfamily Structure of Galliform CR1 Repeats Gen Biol Evol, June 22, 2009; 2009(0): 119 - 130. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|