MosquI, a novel family of mosquito retrotransposons distantly related to the Drosophila I factors, may consist of elements of more than one origin

Abstract

A novel family of non-long-terminal-repeat (non-LTR) retrotransposons, named MosquI, was discovered in the yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti. There were approximately 14 copies of MosquI in the A. aegypti genome. Four of the five analyzed MosquI elements were truncated at the 5' ends while one of them, MosquI-Aa2, was full-length. All five MosquI elements ended with 4-10 TAA tandem repeats, as the Drosophila I factors do. Interestingly, MosquI elements were often found near genes and other repetitive elements. The 6,623-bp MosquI-Aa2 contained two open reading frames (ORFs) flanked by a 404-bp 5' untranslated region and a 326-bp 3' untranslated region. The two ORFs code for nucleocapsids, endonuclease, reverse transcriptase, and RNase H domains. Although overall structural and sequence comparisons suggest that MosquI is highly similar to the Drosophila I factors, phylogenetic analysis based on the reverse transcriptase domains of 40 non-LTR retrotransposons indicate that MosquI and I factors are likely paralogous elements which may have been separated before the split between the ancestors of mollusca and arthropoda. Pairwise comparisons between the four truncated MosquI elements showed 96.7%-99.5% identity at the nucleotide level, while comparisons between the full-length MosquI-Aa2 and the truncated copies showed only 80.2%-81.8% identity. These comparisons and preliminary phylogenetic analyses suggest that the full-length and truncated MosquI elements may belong to two subfamilies originating from two source genes that diverged a long time ago. In contrast to the defective I factors in Drosophila melanogaster, which are likely very old components of the genome, the truncated MosquI elements seem to have been recently active. Finally, the genomic distribution and evolution of MosquI elements are analyzed in the context of other non-LTR retrotransposons in A. aegypti.