retroposition

Okamura K & Nakai K 2008 Retrotransposition as a source of new promoters. Mol Biol Evol 25:1231-1238.

• we identified 29 gene pairs in the human genome, consisting of a functional retrotransposed gene and its parental gene
• a large part of the core promoter had been transcribed, reverse transcribed, and then integrated to be operative at the transposed locus
• this observation can be ascribed to the recent discovery that transcription start sites tend to be interspersed rather than situated at 1 specific site
• the retrotransposability can explain the genesis of some alternative promoters

• from 24,837 human RefSeq entries (September 2007), intronless genes and intron-containing genes were selected to construct a BLASTN query set and the database, respectively
• 631 intronless genes and 23,599 other genes were selected as the candidates for retrotransposed genes and their source genes, respectively