Molecular analysis of repetitive elements in giant genomes of Fritillaria ( liliaceae)
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| Year of publication | 2008 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | The genus Fritillaria L. comprises taxa with the largest genomes so far reported for any plant species, and at the same time, it provides extensive infrageneric genome size variation (30,000-127,000 Mb/C) along with surprising karyotype uniformity. The genus has a bicontinental distribution (Eurasia, North America) and both diverged groups independently show a trend of increasing genome size with divergence. We have constructed fosmid genomic DNA libraries from one species of each group with approximately equal genome sizes (~45,000 Mb/C): Fritillaria imperialis (Eurasia) and F. affinis (North America). Both libraries were screened using total genomic DNA as a probe to identify clones containing highly repetitive elements. Four selected clones were sequenced and about 130 kb of repetitive sequences was characterized for each species. Preliminary data suggest that the percentage of different classes of repetitive elements do not differ significantly between the two species and gypsy-type retrotransposons of various lengths were identified as the dominating component of Fritillaria genomes. Further studies aims to characterize selected repetitive elements in a wide range of Fritillaria species and analyze their contribution to genome size variation across the genus. |
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