SIRE-1, A LONG INTERSPERSED REPETITIVE DNA ELEMENT FROM SOYBEAN WITH WEAK SEQUENCE SIMILARITY TO RETROTRANSPOSONS - INITIAL CHARACTERIZATION AND PARTIAL SEQUENCE

Gm776 is a 776-bp subregion of a member of an interspersed family of relatively homogeneous repetitive DNA elements from soybean (Glycine max). The fragment was originally amplified from soybean DNA by the polymerase chain reaction using a single 22-nucleotide primer, and consequently terminates in an inverted repeat. The elements defined by Gm776 are at least 10.6 kb in length and constitute a family of 500-800 members per haploid genome. The family has been designated SIRE-1 (soybean interspersed repetitive element 1). Overlapping regions of GM776 exhibit suggestive DNA sequence similarity to Ta1 and Ty1, copia-like retrotransposons from Al Arabidopsis thaliana and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, respectively. However, there are no similarities at the amino acid level, and the regions of similarity are not functionally related.