A novel chimeric gene, siren, with retroposed promoter sequence in the Drosophila bipectinata complex

¹ Tokyo Metropolitan University

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: ktamura{at}evolgen.biol.metro-u.ac.jp.

Submitted on February 6, 2005
Revised on July 14, 2005
Accepted on 9 August 2005

	Abstract

Retrotransposons often produce a copy of host genes by their reverse transcriptase activity operating on host gene transcripts. Since transcripts normally do not contain promoter, a retroposed gene copy usually becomes a retropseudogene. However, we found in the Drosophila bipectinata and the closely related species a new chimeric gene, whose promoter was likely produced by retroposition. This chimeric gene, named siren, consists of a tandem duplicate of Adh and a retroposed fragment of CG11779 containing the promoter and a partial intron in addition to the first exon. We found that this unusual structure of a retroposed fragment was obtained by retroposition of nanos, which overlaps with CG11779 on the complementary strand. The potential of retroposition to produce a copy of promoter and intron sequences in the context of gene overlapping was demonstrated.

Key Words: Drosophila bipectinata, exon shuffling, gene duplication, gene overlapping, retroposition

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