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. 2011 Jan 24;6(1):e16328. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0016328

Figure 1. The Ty3/gypsy group of LTR retrotransposons in An. gambiae.

Figure 1

The most abundant type of LTRrs in the genome of An. gambiae is the Ty3/gypsy group, also referred to as Metaviridae according to virus taxonomy [51]. So far, six different lineages of this group have been identified in insects based on the phylogenetic analysis of their reversetranscriptase, ribonuclease H, and integrase amino acid domains [52], [53], and designated CsRn1, Gypsy, Mag, Mdg1, Mdg3 and Osvaldo. (A) Our study in the PEST reference genome of An. gambiae confirmed the presence of all the insect lineages of the Ty3/gypsy group except Osvaldo, grouped in 73 well-represented families. The Mag linage is the most diverse, presenting 41% of the total set of families, followed by Mdg3 (22%), Mdg1 (15%), Gypsy (12%) and CsRn1 (10%). (B) We analyzed a total of 1045 insertions belonging to these 73 families in An. gambiae. The Mdg1 linage is the most abundant with 343 copies, most of them solo-LTRs. In the other four lineages the number of proviral copies exceeds the number of solo-LTRs. About 3% of the total amount of copies analyzed was not classified, mainly due to the presence of unsequenced gaps.