FLIPPER, A MOBILE FOT1-LIKE TRANSPOSABLE ELEMENT IN BOTRYTIS-CINEREA

A' transposable element, Flipper, was isolated from the phytopathogeni c fungus Botrytis cinerea. The element was identified as an insertion sequence within the coding region of the nitrate reductase gene. The F lipper sequence is 1842 bp long with perfect inverted terminal repeats (ITRs) of 48 bp and an open reading frame (ORF) of 533 amino acids, p otentially encoding for a transposase; the element is flanked by the d inucleotide TA. The encoded protein is very similar to the putative tr ansposase of three elements from other phytopathogenic fungi, Fotl fro m Fusarium oxysporum, and Pot2 and MGR586 from Magnaporthe grisea. The number of Flipper elements in strains of B. cinerea varied from 0 to 20 copies per genome. Analysis of the descendants of one cross showed that the segregation ratio of Flipper elements was 2:2 and that the co pies were not linked.