Efficient Transposition of the Youngest MITE Family of Yellow Fever Mosquito in Yeast

Do you have MITEs in you? The answer is almost certainly “yes” if we are talking about Miniature Inverted Repeat Transposable Elements (MITEs). MITEs are extremely abundant in plants and animals, including the genome of Yellow Fever Mosquito. Their dramatic amplification in genomes is difficult to understand because their transposase is unknown in most cases. PDFs Isam Fattash, Chia-Ni Lee and Kaiguo Mo (Yang Lab) recently addressed this problem in their paper “Efficient Transposition of the Youngest MITE Family of Yellow Fever Mosquito in Yeast” published in the FEBS Journal.  Following the recent discovery of the youngest MITE family Gnome and its elusive ancestral element, they detected efficient transposition of Gnome in yeast. The findings pave the way toward the development of these elements as biotech tools for genetic control of mosquito and other pest insects.