Peer Reviewed Journal via three different mandatory reviewing processes, since 2006, and, from September 2020, a fourth mandatory peer-editing has been added.
Most bird species have smaller genomes and fewer repeats than
mammals. Chicken Repeat 1 (CR1) repeat is one of the most
abundant families of repeats, ranging from ~133,000 to ~187,000
copies accounting for ~50 to ~80% of the interspersed repeats in
the zebra finch and chicken genomes, respectively. CR1 repeats
are believed to have arisen from the retrotransposition of a small
number of master elements, which gave rise to multiple CR1
subfamilies in the chicken. In this study, we performed a global
assessment of the divergence distributions, phylogenies, and
consensus sequences of CR1 repeats in the zebra finch genome.
We identified and validated 34 CR1 subfamilies and further
analyzed the correlation between these subfamilies. We also
discovered 4 novel lineage-specific CR1 subfamilies in the zebra
finch when compared to the chicken genome. We built various
evolutionary trees of these subfamilies and concluded that CR1
repeats may play an important role in reshaping the structure of
bird genomes.
