Date of Award

1-1-2013

Document Type

Masters Thesis

Degree Name

M.S.

Organizational Unit

College of Natual Science and Mathematics

First Advisor

Thomas W. Quinn, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Robert Dores

Third Advisor

Nancy Sasaki

Fourth Advisor

Alex Huffman

Keywords

Transposable elements, TE, Genomic evolution, Transposition mechanism

Abstract

Transposable elements (TE) have been found in all genomes and have clearly had a major impact on genomic evolution. The described research takes advantage of an abundant transposable element present in the genomes of Anseriformes, called Chicken Repeat 1 (CR1). Previous studies in Anseriformes suggest that CR1 is presently active in recent evolutionary time (St. John, 2004). A fully functional CR1 element itself is approximately 4.5kb long (Kajikawa, 1997), where almost all inserts are truncated at the 5' end. Because of this, it has been a challenge to isolate a full length, active element. In this study, two CR1 sequences were obtained after screening a genomic library of Cape Barren Goose using probes complimentary to the flanking regions of the element. The findings unveiled sequences with a complete ORF1, ORF2, 3' untranslated region and a portion of the 5' untranslated region. This study gets one step closer a further understanding the transposition mechanism that are adopted by this class of TE's, a non-long terminal repeat (non-LTR) retransposons. Eventually, the capture of an active element could make it especially valuable for future research by investigating their ability to transpose in living cells.

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Cassandra Michelle Weason

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

en

File Size

75 p.

Discipline

Molecular biology

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Genetics Commons

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