Short Communication - Diversity of Retrotransposons in Sordaria fimicola

Retrotransposons have become an inevitable source of genetic diversity due to their abundance in eukaryotic genomes and their insertion in coding regions leads to altered gene expression. We examined the diversity of retroelements in four consecutive generations of different strains of Sordaria fimicola. The parental strains were collected from two contrasting environments of Evolution Canyon i.e. harsh South facing slope and neutral North facing slope. Retroelements profiles were generated in order to detect retrotransposons. Strains from South facing slope exhibited more copy number of Ty3-gypsy, LINEs and Ty1-copia as compared to strains from North facing slope. In total, 52 fragments of Metaviridae (Ty3-gypsy), 104 fragments of LINEs and 66 fragments of Ty1-copia were sequenced. In this way, strains from the contrasting environments were successfully discriminated on the basis of retrotransposons.