SIRE-1, A LONG INTERSPERSED REPETITIVE DNA ELEMENT FROM SOYBEAN WITH WEAK SEQUENCE SIMILARITY TO RETROTRANSPOSONS - INITIAL CHARACTERIZATION AND PARTIAL SEQUENCE

Gm776 is a 776-bp subregion of a member of an interspersed family of r elatively homogeneous repetitive DNA elements from soybean (Glycine ma x). The fragment was originally amplified from soybean DNA by the poly merase chain reaction using a single 22-nucleotide primer, and consequ ently terminates in an inverted repeat. The elements defined by Gm776 are at least 10.6 kb in length and constitute a family of 500-800 memb ers per haploid genome. The family has been designated SIRE-1 (soybean interspersed repetitive element 1). Overlapping regions of GM776 exhi bit suggestive DNA sequence similarity to Ta1 and Ty1, copia-like retr otransposons from Al Arabidopsis thaliana and Saccharomyces cerevisiae , respectively. However, there are no similarities at the amino acid l evel, and the regions of similarity are not functionally related.