Johnjoe McFadden wrote:
>> I am interested in the possibility of transposable elements being involved
> in speciation events.
>> Does anybody know of examples of species or genera-specific insertion
> sequences or transposable elements from prokaryotes or eukaryotes?
>> A few examples that I am aware of are IS200 in Salmonella species, IS6110 in
> Mycobacterium tuberclulosis complex and IS900 in Mycobacterium paratuberculosis.
>> Any others?
>
You might be interested in L1 (aka LINE) elements which are non-LTR
retrotransposons in mammals that have a number of species-specific subfamilies.
You could take a look at various papers of ours on using these elements as
"molecular fossils" to look at mammalian phylogenies (see the review: 1. Furano,
A. V., and Usdin, K. (1995) J. Biol. Chem. 270, 1-4; URL:
http://www-jbc.stanford.edu/jbc/scripts/article/ref=270:43:25301 ). Also the work of
Steve Hardies, Marshall Edgell, and Arian Smit.
Hope this helps
Karen Usdin
Section on Genomic Structure and Function
Laboratory of Biochemical Pharmacology
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda MD, USA
