A Cambridge CRUK/Biochemistry study ‘Lifestyles of Gypsy-family transposons shape their regulatory mechanisms’, led by Anna-Maria Papameletiou with contributions from Susanne Bornelöv, Ben Nicholson and Greg Hannon, was recently published in PNAS. It analysed the transposon content across 249 species, leading to a large resource of consensus sequences and some interesting evolutionary insights.
Susanne Bornelöv said: "In this study, Anna-Maria has hugely improved and extended our previous work on characterising transposable elements in Drosophila. She painstakingly (and somewhat painfully!) annotated a subset of LTR transposon families across all available Drosophila genomes, identifying their LTR regions and major open reading frames.
Many LTR transposons are expressed in germ cells, while others avoid host cell defences by being expressed in the neighbouring somatic cells. Anna-Maria came up with an approach to correlate the presence or absence of open reading frames that allow cell-to-cell transfer with transcription factor binding-site motifs in the transposon LTRs. This allowed us to identify a set of transcription factors that may regulate transposon expression, including previously reported Tj.
There's plenty more to read in the paper, and hopefully this resource will enable a lot of future work. Also, don't forget to check out our code/data repository and let us know if you are missing anything."