RESEARCH ARTICLE
Transcriptome Analysis of ESTs from a Chaetognath Reveals a Deep-Branching Clade of Retrovirus-Like Retrotransposons
Roxane M Barthélémy, Jean-Paul Casanova, Eric Faure*
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2008Volume: 2
First Page: 44
Last Page: 60
Publisher Id: TOVJ-2-44
DOI: 10.2174/1874357900802010044
Article History:
Received Date: 28/3/2008Revision Received Date: 8/4/2008
Acceptance Date: 9/4/2008
Electronic publication date: 7/5/2008
Collection year: 2008
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/), which permits unrestrictive use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
Chaetognaths constitute a small marine phylum exhibiting several characteristic which are highly unusual in animal genomes, including two classes of both rRNA and protein ribosomal genes. As in this phylum presence of retrovirus-like elements has never been documented, analysis of a published expressed sequence tag (EST) collection of the chaetognath Spadella cephaloptera has been made. Twelve sequences representing transcript sections of reverse transcriptase domain of active retrotransposons were isolated from~11,000 ESTs. Five of them are originated from Gypsy retrovirus-like elements, whereas the other are transcripts from a Bel-Pao LTR-retrotransposon, a Penelope-like element and LINE retrotransposons. Moreover, a part of a putative integrase has also been found. Phylogenetic analyses suggest a deep-branching clade of the retrovirus-like elements, which is in agreement with the probably Cambrian origin of the phylum. Moreover, retrotransposons have not been found in telomeric-like transcripts which are probably constituted by both vertebrate and arthropod canonical repeats.