Mobile elements in plants

Evolution under domestication involving disturbance of genic balance

“…Thus homologous mutants could have occurred and could have been selected in each cereal under any one set of agro-ecological conditions . It is also possible, but entirely hypothetical at present, that gene-specific transposable elements (Peterson, 1987) have spread between crops, through pollen or some other vector, within each agroecosystem, thus accelerating specific mutations in several different cereal crops . Most mutations of Drosophila caused by gypsy or copia-like transposable elements display loss of function phenotypes, and likewise most mutations of the achaete-scute gene complex result in reduction of hairiness .…”

Plant-transposable elements and gene tagging

“…Since not many active retro-transposons have been described in plants, they are excluded from this review (the reader is referred to Grandbastian [22] for details), whereas we wish to concentrate on classical transposable elements, even though numerous reviews on this subject have appeared [7,13,17,21,56,61 ]. Molecular results for two transposable element systems have, however, indicated common features for their mechanism of transposition.…”

Phenotypic effects of short-range and aberrant transposition in Antirrhinum majus

“…An interesting property of these unstable alleles is that they can give rise to series of derivative alleles conferring altered intensities of pigrnentation (reviewed in [ 18,20,3]. Many of the derivatives confer stable phenotypes and have arisen by imprecise excision of transposable elements from the host genes, altering functionally important gene sequences [27,5].…”