Resolving the prevalence of somatic transposition in Drosophila

Abstract
Data availability
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Abstract

Somatic transposition in mammals and insects could increase cellular diversity and neural mobilization has been implicated in age-dependent decline. To understand the impact of transposition in somatic cells it is essential to reliably measure the frequency and map locations of new insertions. Here we identified thousands of putative somatic transposon insertions in neurons from individual Drosophila melanogaster using whole-genome sequencing. However, the number of de novo insertions did not correlate with transposon expression or fly age. Analysing our data with exons as "immobile genetic elements" revealed a similar frequency of unexpected exon translocations. A new sequencing strategy that recovers transposon : chromosome junction information revealed most putative de novo transposon and exon insertions likely result from unavoidable chimeric artefacts. Reanalysis of other published data suggests similar artefacts are often mistaken for genuine somatic transposition. We conclude that somatic transposition is less prevalent in Drosophila than previously envisaged.

Data availability

The following data sets were generated

1. Treiber and Waddell
(2017) Data from: Resolving the prevalence of somatic transposition in Drosophila
Available at Dryad Digital Repository under a CC0 Public Domain Dedication.

http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fd930

The following previously published data sets were used

1. Khurana et al.
(2011) Adaptation to transposon invasion in Drosophila melanogaster
SRP007937.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra/?term=SRP007937

Article and author information

Author details

Christoph Daniel Treiber

Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour, The University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

For correspondence
christoph.d.treiber@gmail.com

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-6994-091X
Scott Waddell

Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour, The University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

For correspondence
scott.waddell@cncb.ox.ac.uk

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-4503-6229

Funding

Wellcome (200846/Z/16/Z)

Scott Waddell

Bettencourt-Schueller Foundation

Scott Waddell

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.