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- Title
Allopolyploidization induced the activation of Ty1-copia retrotransposons in Cucumis hytivus, a newly formed Cucumis allotetraploid.
- Authors
Biao Jiang; Qun-Feng Lou; Dong Wang; Zhi-Ming Wu; Wan-Ping Zhang; Jin-Feng Chen
- Abstract
Allopolyploidy is an important process of species evolution that delivers a huge 'genomic shock' to the host genome. To investigate the effect of allopolyploidy on the expression of retrotransposons in a new synthetic allopolyploid, Cucumis hytivus, RT-PCR strategy was carried out to amplify reverse transcriptase (RT) genes from allotetraploid C. hytivus and its diploid parents, C. hystrix and C. sativus, using degenerate oligonucleotide primers corresponding to conserved RT domains of Ty1-copia retrotransposons. Only the allotetraploid yielded a specific product with expected size. After recovering and sequencing, 18 unique clones with significantly high heterogeneity were obtained. All of these clones were different from each other and could be divided into at least eight groups. The synonymous (dS) and nonsynonymous (dN) substitution analysis suggested that the RT sequences had been under constraint or purifying selection. A comparative maximum likelihood (ML) tree was constructed based on the deduced amino acids of the 18 RT sequences and those of other species acquired from the GenBank database. These results showed that the cloned sequences had high homology with both related and unrelated species, implying that they shared a common ancestor. The expression analysis of the cloned reverse transcriptase in the first four generations of allotetraploid further proved that the activation of retrotransposons was induced by allopolyploidization. These findings provide important information for polyploid evolution and will be of great importance for further epigenetic studies.
- Subjects
REVERSE transcriptase; NUCLEOTIDE sequence; POLYMERASE chain reaction; GENOMES; OLIGONUCLEOTIDES; AMINO acids; POLYPLOIDY; EPIGENESIS
- Publication
Botanical Studies, 2011, Vol 52, Issue 2, p145
- ISSN
1817-406X
- Publication type
Article