“Dynamic evolution of genes derived from endogenous viral elements in mammalian species”

Speaker: Prof. So Nakagawa, Assistant Professor, Department of Molecular Life Science, Tokai University School of Medicine

Title: “Dynamic evolution of genes derived from endogenous viral elements in mammalian species”

Abstract:

In mammals, approximately 10% of genome sequences correspond to endogenous viral elements (EVEs) including endogenous retroviruses (ERVs), which are thought to be derived from viral infections in germ cells. Although most EVEs have been inactivated by insertions, deletions, substitutions, and/or epigenetic modifications, a few open reading frames (ORFs) of EVEs are still active and express viral proteins in the hosts. Indeed, several genes derived from EVEs have been found to be functional for host species, such as syncytins for placenta development in various mammals. EVE-derived genes are unique in that their evolutionary histories differ among mammalian lineages.  For example, various mammalian species have different syncytin genes that show similar molecular functions, but those have been acquired independently in each lineage during mammalian evolution. To investigate the function and evolution of EVEs in mammalian genomes, we developed EVE ORF databases (http://geve.med.u-tokai.ac.jp, Nakagawa and Takahashi, Database, 2016) containing a total of 736,771 non-overlapping EVE ORFs for 20 mammalian genomes. The gEVE database provides nucleotide and amino acid sequences, genomic loci and functional annotations of EVE ORFs. In this seminar, I will introduce the gEVE database as well as its application to the various transcriptome analyses with various large-scale sequencing data in various mammalian species to elucidate the dynamic evolution driven by EVEs.

We look forward to seeing many of you at the seminar.

Sincerely,
Yoko Fujitomi
Plant Epigenetics Unit (Saze unit)