Element:Tribel

Description Tribel is a LTR retrotransposon found in the genome of the insect “red flour beetle” Tribolium castaneum (Llorens et al. 2009). Its name is an acronym derived from “Tribolium castaneum Bel/Pao element”. Tribel belongs to the Bel clade (Copeland et al. 2005) within Branch 1 of the Bel/Pao family (Llorens et al. 2009). The genome of Tribel is about of 6 Kb in size (5957 bp long), including LTRs of 284 nt. The internal region of this element contains three ORFs encoding for the gag and pol polyproteins. The largest ORF (897aa) contains both potential gag and pol domains: three putative Cys-motifs characteristic of the gag associated nucleocapsid domain of Bel/Pao LTR retrotransposons, and the pol protease and the N-terminal region of the reverse transcriptase domains. The second ORF (334aa) presents the remaining part of reverse transcriptase and the RNase H domains, the last ORF (373aa) codes for the integrase pol domain (Llorens et al. 2009). Structure Figure not to scale. If present, long terminal repeats (LTRs) have been highlighted in blue. Amino acid motifs noted with lines indicate the conserved residues in each protein domain, abbreviations below mean: MA=matrix PR=protease DU or DUT=dUTPase TM=transmembrane TAV or IBMP=transactivator/viroplasmin or inclusion body matrix protein CA=capsid RT=reverse transcriptase INT=Integrase CHR=chromodomain NC=nucleocapsid RH=RNaseH SU=surface MOV=movement protein PPT=polypurine tract PBS=primer binding site ATF=aphid transmission factor VAP=virion associated protein Related literature Mobile DNA II. (Craig et al. 2002)

Genbank accession: 86577607 Clade: Bel Cluster or genus: Undetermined Branch or class: Branch 1 Family: Bel/Pao System: LTR retroelements Host: Explore the Tree Life Project Tribolium castaneum Courtesy of Alex Wild, Insect photography Web site " Browse all elements