A genome-wide screening of BEL-Pao like retrotransposons in Anopheles gambiae by the LTR_STRUC program

The advanced status of assembly of the nematoceran Anopheles gambiae genomic sequence allowed us to perform a wide genome analysis to looking at the presence of Long Terminal Repeats (LTRs) in the range of 10 kb by means of the LTR_STRUC tool. More than three hundred sequences were retrieved and 210 were treated as putative complete retrotransposons that were individually analysed with respect to known retrotransposons of A. gambiae and D. melanogaster. The results show that the vast majority of the retrotransposons analysed belong to the Ty3/gypsy class and only 8% to the Ty1/copia class. In addition, phylogenetic analysis allowed us to characterize in more detail the relationship of a large BEL-Pao lineage in which a single family was shown to harbour an additional env gene.