An Atlas of Plant Transposable Elements

F1000Res. 2021 Nov 24:10:1194. doi: 10.12688/f1000research.74524.1. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Advances in genomic sequencing have recently offered vast opportunities for biological exploration, unraveling the evolution and improving our understanding of Earth biodiversity. Due to distinct plant species characteristics in terms of genome size, ploidy and heterozygosity, transposable elements (TEs) are common characteristics of many genomes. TEs are ubiquitous and dispersed repetitive DNA sequences that frequently impact the evolution and composition of the genome, mainly due to their redundancy and rearrangements. For this study, we provided an atlas of TE data by employing an easy-to-use portal ( APTE website ). To our knowledge, this is the most extensive and standardized analysis of TEs in plant genomes. We evaluated 67 plant genomes assembled at chromosome scale, recovering a total of 49,802,023 TE records, representing a total of 47,992,091,043 (~47,62%) base pairs (bp) of the total genomic space. We observed that new types of TEs were identified and annotated compared to other data repositories. By establishing a standardized catalog of TE annotation on 67 genomes, new hypotheses, exploration of TE data and their influences on the genomes may allow a better understanding of their function and processes. All original code and an example of how we developed the TE annotation strategy is available on GitHub ( Extended data).

Keywords: atlas; genome-wide; large-scale; mobile elements; plants; standardized.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • DNA Transposable Elements* / genetics
  • Genome, Plant / genetics
  • Genomics*
  • Plants / genetics

Substances

  • DNA Transposable Elements

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001 (to D.L.F.P.); a National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) undergraduate fellowship (116568/2018-6 to T.S.A.); Pró-Reitoria de Pesquisa e Pós-Graduação (PROPPG - UTFPR) (to A.R.P; reference 11/2016); NVIDIA from the GPU Grant Program 2019 - Accelerated Data Science Call for the GPU Seed Units: Titan V device; STIC AmSud Latin America (Brazil, Chile, and Colombia) and France from TELearning Project 2021-22 (21-STIC-13); Fundação Araucária - NAPI de Bioinformática (Convênio PDI 66/2021).