Long-read detection of transposable element mobilization in the soma of hypomethylated Arabidopsis thaliana individuals
Discuss this preprint
Start a discussion What are Sciety discussions?Listed in
This article is not in any list yet, why not save it to one of your lists.Abstract
Background
Because transposable elements (TEs) can cause heritable genetic changes, past work on TE mobility in Arabidopsis thaliana has mostly focused on new TE insertions in the germline of hypomethylated plants. It is, however, well-known that TEs can also be active in the soma, although the high-confidence detection of somatic events has been challenging.
Results
Here, we leverage the high accuracy of PacBio HiFi long reads to evaluate the somatic mobility of TEs in individuals of an A. thaliana non-reference strain lacking activity of METHYLTRANSFERASE1 (MET1), a major component of the DNA methylation maintenance machinery. Most somatically mobile families coincide with those found in germline studies of hypomethylated genotypes, although the exact TE copies differ. We also discover mobile elements that had been missed by standard TE annotation methods. Somatic TE activity is variable among individual plants, but also within TE families. Finally, our approach points to the possible involvement of alternative transposition as a cause for somatic hypermutability in a region that contains two closely spaced VANDAL21 elements.
Conclusions
Long-read sequencing reveals widespread TE transposition in the soma of A. thaliana hypomethylated mutants. Assessing somatic instead of germline mobilization is a fast and reliable method to investigate different aspects of TE mobility at the single plant level.
