Transposable Elements and Vertebrate Protein Diversity

Interspersed repetitive sequences are major components of eukaryotic genomes. Repetitive elements comprise about 50% of the mammalian genome. They interact with the whole genome and influence its evolution. Repetitive elements may serve as recombination hot spots or acquire specific cellular functions such as RNA transcription control or become part of protein coding regions. The latter is a subject of presented analysis. We searched all currently available vertebrate protein sequences, including human proteome complement for the presence of transposable elements. It appears that insertion of TE-cassettes into open reading frames is a general phenomena. They can be found in all vertebrate lineages and originate in all types of transposable elements. It seems that genomes use those cassettes as ‘ready to use’ motifs in their evolutionary experiments. Most of TE-cassettes are used to create alternative forms of a message and usually the other form, without TE-cassette, is expressed in a cell. Tables listing vertebrate messages with TE-cassettes are available at http://warta.bio.psu.edu/ScrapYard/.