Disease relevance of SPAC9.04

• Finally, production of Tf2-neo proteins and cDNA was also analyzed; surprisingly, Tf2 was found to produce its reverse transcriptase as a single species in which it is fused to protease, unlike all other retroviruses and retrotransposons [1].
• Sequence comparisons between Tf1 and Tf2 indicate an extreme divergence of the putative capsid protein-encoding regions of these two elements, as well as divergence of a segment of the LTR, but otherwise virtually identical sequence [2].

High impact information on SPAC9.04

• The Tf2 retrotransposon, found in the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, is nearly identical to its sister element, Tf1, in its reverse transcriptase-RNase H and integrase domains but is very divergent in the gag domain, the protease, the 5' untranslated region, and the U3 domain of the long terminal repeats [1].
• It has now been demonstrated that a neo-marked copy of Tf2 overexpressed from a heterologous promoter can mobilize into the S. pombe genome and produce true transposition events [1].

Biological context of SPAC9.04

• Tf1 and Tf2 both possess long terminal repeats and predicted protein sequences that resemble the protease, reverse transcriptase, and integrase domains of retroviruses [3].

References