Worm Breeder's Gazette 10(2): 143
These abstracts should not be cited in bibliographies. Material contained herein should be treated as personal communication and should be cited as such only with the consent of the author.
Recently a homology was found between the TcA gene in Tc1 and an ORF in the Drosophila low repetitive sequence HB (Dr. S. Henikoff pers. comm. and manuscript in prep.). If one assumes that the Tc1 TcA gene encodes the transposase of the element, then it would follow that the target sequence of this enzyme (the ends of Tc1) could be homologous to those of the HB sequences as well. Therefore I compared the ends of the two elements. Since HB has not been shown to jump, the exact ends of the element are not defined. I looked at 8 ends of 4 elements (1), and took the point up to where they are identical or 7 out of 8 identical to be the assumed end of HB. In the figure the assumed end of HB and the end of Tc I (2) are compared. [See Figure 1] As can be seen they have 16 out of 24 basepairs in common. This is sufficient to conclude that Tc1 and HB elements are related transposable elements (or in the case of HB perhaps relics of transposable elements). To my knowledge this is the first case of similarity between DNA transposons of not directly related species. I'd like to thank Dr. S. Henikoff for communicating his observation prior to publication.