Retrovirus-like features and site specific insertions of a transposable element, tom, in Drosophila ananassae

The tom element, putatively associated with optic morphology (Om) mutations in Drosophila ananassae, was identified as a retrovirus-like transposable element. The tom element was found to terminate with 475 (or 474) base pair direct repeats which are identical in sequence to each other. Southern blot and heteroduplex analyses showed the tom element to have high homology to 297 and 17.6, two retrotransposons found in D. melanogaster. As in the cases of 297 and 17.6, tom includes nucleotide sequences coding for a presumptive protease and reverse transcriptase, similar in amino acid sequence to those of the Moloney murine leukaemia virus. At the tom insertion site of the sn9g locus, a host DNA sequence (T)ATAT was found to be duplicated on each side of the tom insertion and all other tom elements examined were also flanked by (T)ATAT. In each of six cases, the 5' flanking host sequence was TATAT. These results indicate that the target sequence of the tom element may be TATAT and that the entire region or a part of this sequence was duplicated on insertion of the tom element.