Guest, a transposable element belonging to the Tcl/mariner superfamily is an ancient invader of Neurospora genomes

Guest is a transposable element of the Tc1/mariner superfamily with 30-40 bp terminal inverted repeats and a TA dinucleotide target site duplication. Guest was originally discovered in the St. Lawrence 74A laboratory strain of the filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa. In this report, Guest iterations subcloned from a cosmid library of the Oakridge 74A strain were used to design PCR primers that permitted the detection of Guest in wild isolates of N. crassa. Guest is present in N. crassa as multiple copies ranging between 100 bp and 2.4kb and is present in the mating type locus of several Neurospora species. Bioinformatic analysis of the entire N. crassa genome (Oakridge 74A strain) detected 48 Guest iterations. All iterations appeared to have been inactivated either by repeat-induced point mutation or sequence deletion, with the majority being remnants less than 400 bp in length. The possible involvement of Guest in the evolution of the variable region that flanks the mating type idiomorphs in several Neurospora species is discussed. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.