Pest Management in Horticultural Ecosystems

Mobile genetic elements are discrete sequences in the genome that are able to transport themselves to other locations within genome, which may have direct consequences on gene expression. More than 96 per cent of the transposable elements, occurring in heat shock promoters are P transposable element. In natural populations of Drosophila melanogaster, the promoters of heat-shock genes are especially susceptible to the insertion of transposable elements. These mobile elements often leave small rearrangements called transposon footprints at sites where they excise. It was proved that transposable elements insertion and subsequent excision resulted in the production of 8 bp direct repeats. The transposable elements often insert into the genes’ regulatory regions is due to their high expression level. In this context, Heat Shock Protein sequences, mainly HSP90 and HSP83 in Solanaceae crops were analysed for presence of transposable element excision footprints using in silico methods. It was found that out of the 17 hsp sequences, 14 hsp coding sequences were having 8 bp transposable element excision footprints consistently at the same location. These footprints left in individual sequences are surprisingly not random; excision footprints predominate consistently in each sequence. This suggests that the excision event and footprint formation involves DNA repair of hsp sequences flanking the transposable element. Identifying these footprints are useful for discovering genes that encodes for heat shock proteins in Solanaceae crops.