CHARACTERIZATION OF TRANSCRIPTS FROM THE DICTYOSTELIUM-DISCOIDEUM RETROTRANSPOSABLE GENETIC ELEMENT DRE

All of the approximately 150 copies of the Dictyostelium discoideum re trotransposable element DRE are integrated 50 +/- 4 nucleotides upstre am from different transfer RNA genes. These genomic regions are genera lly devoid of informative DNA why integration of the retrotransposon a t these position never causes phenotypic mutations. This property make s DRE attractive as a tool in gene therapy where vectors with predicta ble integration specificities are still not available. Due to the natu re as retrotransposon transcription is a prerequisite for the element to integrate at a new genomic position. Here we describe some transcri ption properties of DRE based on Northern blot analyses and on the cha racterization of in vitro synthesized cDNAs.