Long-term experimental evolution reveals purifying selection on piRNA-mediated control of transposable element expression

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• dc.contributor.author Bergthorsson, Ulfar
• dc.contributor.author Sheeba, Caroline J.
• dc.contributor.author Konrad, Anke
• dc.contributor.author Belicard, Toni
• dc.contributor.author Beltran Marqués, Antoni
• dc.contributor.author Katju, Vaishali
• dc.contributor.author Sarkies, Peter
• dc.date.accessioned 2022-04-25T12:28:26Z
• dc.date.available 2022-04-25T12:28:26Z
• dc.date.issued 2020
• dc.description.abstract Background: Transposable elements (TEs) are an almost universal constituent of eukaryotic genomes. In animals, Piwi-interacting small RNAs (piRNAs) and repressive chromatin often play crucial roles in preventing TE transcription and thus restricting TE activity. Nevertheless, TE content varies widely across eukaryotes and the dynamics of TE activity and TE silencing across evolutionary time is poorly understood. Results: Here, we used experimentally evolved populations of C. elegans to study the dynamics of TE expression over 409 generations. The experimental populations were evolved at population sizes of 1, 10 and 100 individuals to manipulate the efficiency of natural selection versus genetic drift. We demonstrate increased TE expression relative to the ancestral population, with the largest increases occurring in the smallest populations. We show that the transcriptional activation of TEs within active regions of the genome is associated with failure of piRNA-mediated silencing, whilst desilenced TEs in repressed chromatin domains retain small RNAs. Additionally, we find that the sequence context of the surrounding region influences the propensity of TEs to lose silencing through failure of small RNA-mediated silencing. Conclusions: Our results show that natural selection in C. elegans is responsible for maintaining low levels of TE expression, and provide new insights into the epigenomic features responsible.
• dc.description.sponsorship This work was supported by the UK Medical Research Council (PS: MC-A652-5PY80 ‘Epigenetics and Evolution’) and the National Science Foundation grant (VK: MCB-1565844)
• dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
• dc.identifier.citation Bergthorsson U, Sheeba CJ, Konrad A, Belicard T, Beltran T, Katju V et al. Long-term experimental evolution reveals purifying selection on piRNA-mediated control of transposable element expression. BMC Biol. 2020 Nov 6;18(1):162. DOI:10.1186/s12915-020-00897-y
• dc.identifier.doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12915-020-00897-y
• dc.identifier.issn 1741-7007
• dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10230/52888
• dc.language.iso eng
• dc.publisher BioMed Central
• dc.rights © Ulfar Bergthorsson et al. 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made
• dc.rights.accessRights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
• dc.rights.uri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• dc.subject.other Caenorhabditis elegans
• dc.subject.other Cromatina
• dc.subject.other Epigenètica
• dc.title Long-term experimental evolution reveals purifying selection on piRNA-mediated control of transposable element expression
• dc.type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
• dc.type.version info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion