The transposable element Uhu from Hawaiian Drosophila--member of the widely dispersed class of Tc1-like transposons

Abstract

We report the complete nucleotide sequence of the transposable element Uhu from the vicinity of the alcohol dehydrogenase (Adh) gene of Drosophila heteroneura (an endemic Hawaiian Drosophila). The complete element is about 1650 base-pairs (bp) long, has 46-50 base-pair inverse imperfect repeats at it's ends, and contains a large open reading frame potentially encoding a 192 amino acid protein. We demonstrate that Uhu belongs to a class of transposable elements which includes Tc1 from Caenorhabditis elegans, Barney from Caenorhabditis briggsae, and HB1 from Drosophila melanogaster. All of these elements share significant sequence similarity, are approximately 1600 base pairs long, have short inverse terminal repeats (ITRs), contain open reading frames (ORFs) with significant sequence identity, and appear to insert specifically at TA sequences generating target site duplications.