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. 2017 Mar 31;15:13. doi: 10.1186/s12964-017-0168-z

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© The Author(s). 2017

Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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Fig. 4 — Taxonomy of retrotransposons. The so-called retrotransposons or class I transposons as opposed to class II (DNA) transposons (not depicted) can be grouped into long terminal repeat (LTR) containing and non-LTR transposons. The best investigated LTR retrotransposons are the human endogenous retroviral elements (ERV). Together with the non-LTR retrotransposons LINE (long interspersed nuclear elements), human ERVs are capable of retrotransposition in an autonomous manner. In contrast, short interspersed nuclear elements (SINEs) like ALU or MIR (mammalian-wide interspersed repeats) sequences cannot perform autonomous retrotransposition. Nevertheless, ALU sequences may be able to move with the help of active LINE elements