The third marsupial genome was sequenced from the Tasmanian devil (), a species that currently is driven to extinction by a rare transmissible cancer. The transposable element (TE) landscape of the Tasmanian devil genome revealed that the main driver of retrotransposition the ong terspersed lement 1 (LINE1) seem to have become inactivated during the past 12 million years. Strangely, the hort terspersed lements (SINE), that normally hijacks the LINE1 retrotransposition system, became inactive prior to LINE1 at around 30 million years ago. The SINE inactivation was in vitro verified in several species. Here I discuss that the apparent LINE1 inactivation might be caused by a genome assembly artifact. The repetitive fraction of any genome is highly complex to assemble and the observed problems are not unique to the Tasmanian devil genome.
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| http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2159256X.2015.1119926 | DOI Listing |
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