Abstract
Many transposable elements exist in all living things from prokaryote to eukaryote. By dissecting the En/Spm functional components it was demonstrated in tobacco plants that two elemnt-encoded proteins TNPA and TNPD are both required and sufficient to mobilize En/Spm, and it was shown that that TNPA binds specifically to a subset of subterminal repeats (STR) sequences. The general structure of En/Spm is typical for many transposable elements, and Tdc is one of them.
In carrot genome, more than 20 copies of En/Spm-like transposable elements, Tdc, were found, and three subfamilies of Tdc were characterized.
The ends of Tdc also contain the 10 bp of STR sequences. We identified Tdc cDNA, which was defective, from cDNA library of carrot as the factor of binding to STR by yeast one-hybrid system. Furthermore, to identify of core cDNA region, we made deletion cDNA of transposase and estimated efficiency of binding to the sequence.
