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Falling fowl of the chicken reference genome: pitfalls of studying polymorphic endogenous retroviruses
1Jack Birch Unit for Molecular Carcinogenesis, The Department of Biology and York Biomedical Research Institute, The University of York, York, YO10 5DD, UK. andrew.mason@york.ac.uk.
Abstract:
High quality reference genomes have facilitated the study of endogenous retroviruses (ERVs). However, there are an increasing number of published works which assume the ERVs in reference genomes are universal; even those of evolutionarily recent integrations. Consequently, these studies fail to properly characterise polymorphic ERVs, and even propose biological functions for ERVs that may not actually be present in the genomes of interest. Here, I outline the pitfalls of three studies of chicken endogenous Avian Leukosis Viruses (ALVEs or "ev genes": the "original" ERVs), all confounded by the assumption that the reference genome provides a representative ALVE baseline.
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