Complete fusion of a transposon and herpesvirus created the Teratorn mobile element in medaka fish

Yusuke Inoue, Tomonori Saga, Takumi Aikawa, Masahiko Kumagai, Atsuko Shimada, Yasushi Kawaguchi, Kiyoshi Naruse, Shinichi Morishita, Akihiko Koga and Hiroyuki Takeda ()
Additional contact information
Yusuke Inoue: The University of Tokyo
Tomonori Saga: The University of Tokyo
Takumi Aikawa: The University of Tokyo
Masahiko Kumagai: The University of Tokyo
Atsuko Shimada: The University of Tokyo
Yasushi Kawaguchi: The University of Tokyo
Kiyoshi Naruse: National Institute for Basic Biology
Shinichi Morishita: The University of Tokyo
Akihiko Koga: Kyoto University
Hiroyuki Takeda: The University of Tokyo

Nature Communications, 2017, vol. 8, issue 1, 1-14

Abstract: Abstract Mobile genetic elements (e.g., transposable elements and viruses) display significant diversity with various life cycles, but how novel elements emerge remains obscure. Here, we report a giant (180-kb long) transposon, Teratorn, originally identified in the genome of medaka, Oryzias latipes. Teratorn belongs to the piggyBac superfamily and retains the transposition activity. Remarkably, Teratorn is largely derived from a herpesvirus of the Alloherpesviridae family that could infect fish and amphibians. Genomic survey of Teratorn-like elements reveals that some of them exist as a fused form between piggyBac transposon and herpesvirus genome in teleosts, implying the generality of transposon-herpesvirus fusion. We propose that Teratorn was created by a unique fusion of DNA transposon and herpesvirus, leading to life cycle shift. Our study supports the idea that recombination is the key event in generation of novel mobile genetic elements.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-00527-2 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:8:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-017-00527-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-00527-2

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().