analysis of the features and source gene composition of the aluyg6 subfamily of human retrotransposons分析基因的组成特点和来源aluyg6人类反转位子活动的亚科.pdfVIP

BMC Evolutionary Biology BioMed Central Research article Open Access Analysis of the features and source gene composition of the AluYg6 subfamily of human retrotransposons Pamela Styles and John FY Brookfield* Address: Institute of Genetics, School of Biology, University of Nottingham, Queens Medical Centre, Nottingham, UK Email: Pamela Styles - plxps3@nottingham.ac.uk; John FY Brookfield* - john.brookfield@nottingham.ac.uk * Corresponding author Published: 1 July 2007 Received: 2 March 2007 Accepted: 1 July 2007 BMC Evolutionary Biology 2007, 7:102 doi:10.1186/1471-2148-7-102 This article is available from: /1471-2148/7/102 © 2007 Styles and Brookfield; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Alu elements are a family of SINE retrotransposons in primates. They are classified into subfamilies according to specific diagnostic mutations from the general Alu consensus. It is now believed that there may be several retrotranspositionally-competent source genes within an Alu subfamily. To investigate the evolution of young Alu elements it is critical to have access to complete subfamilies, which, following the release of the final human genome assembly, can now be obtained using in silico methods.