Adaptation of intronic homing endonuclease for successful horizontal transmission

Title Adaptation of intronic homing endonuclease for s uccessful horizontal transmission

Adaptation for horizontal transfer in a homing endonuclease.

Selfish genes of no function other than self-propagation are susceptible to degeneration if they become fixed in a population, and regular transfer to new species may be the only means for their long-term persistence. To test this idea we surveyed 24 species of yeast for VDE, a nuclear, intein-associated homing endonuclease gene (HEG) originally discovered in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Phylogene...

Evolutionary maintenance of selfish homing endonuclease genes in the absence of horizontal transfer.

Homing endonuclease genes are "selfish" mobile genetic elements whose endonuclease promotes the spread of its own gene by creating a break at a specific target site and using the host machinery to repair the break by copying and inserting the gene at this site. Horizontal transfer across the boundary of a species or population within which mating takes place has been thought to be necessary for...

The LAGLIDADG Homing Endonuclease Family

The LAGLIDADG protein family includes the first identified and biochemically characterized intron-encoded proteins (Dujon 1980; Lazowska et al. 1980; Jacquier and Dujon 1985), as described in this volume by Dujon. It has been variously termed the ‘DOD’, ‘dodecapeptide’, ‘dodecamer’, and ‘decapeptide’ endonuclease family, based on the conservation of a ten-residue sequence motif (Dujon 1989; Duj...

Homing endonuclease structure and function.

Homing endonucleases are encoded by open reading frames that are embedded within group I, group II and archael introns, as well as inteins (intervening sequences that are spliced and excised post-translationally). These enzymes initiate transfer of those elements (and themselves) by generating strand breaks in cognate alleles that lack the intervening sequence, as well as in additional ectopic ...