4. Mobile DNA of model organisms

Model organisms have contributed greatly to our knowledge of mobile DNA. Among those organisms are various yeast species, Drosophila, worms, Arabidopsis (the mustard weed), bacteria, mouse, and rat. Mobile DNA in the mouse is discussed in a later chapter.

Mobile elements have been studied extensively in S. cerevisiae (the budding yeast), Schizosaccharomyces pombi (S. pombe, the fission yeast), and Candida albicans (the pathogenic fungus). These yeast species are extremely far apart on the evolutionary tree, meaning that they diverged from one another hundreds of millions of years ago. S. cerevisiae have a relatively small number of Ty elements that are LTR-retrotransposons. In an analysis of the yeast genome in ...

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