Dear Prof. Dariusz Grzebelus,
Guest Editor,
Genes.
We congratulate you for organizing a very important Special Issue on “Transposable Elements in Plant Genomes”. Thank you very much for inviting us to contribute to this Special Issue.
We are happy to contribute to this special issue with a review manuscript entitled “Current status and prospects of transposable elements in epigenetic modification and genome evolution”.
This is a tentative title, and we have also given the abstract below, in case you or another editor would like to read further to confirm our contribution.
Dr Zhou Mingbing
The State Key Laboratory of Subtropical Silviculture,
Zhejiang A&F University, Zhejiang Province, China.
E-mail: zhoumingbing@zafu.edu.cn
Abstract
Transposable elements (TEs), essential genetic elements in the plant genomes, capable of moving from one place to another of the genome by “cut-paste” (DNA transposons) and “copy-paste” (retrotransposons) mechanisms. Being considered as a junk DNA, the knowledge of the TEs dynamics in the genome remains poor. However, the availability of genome sequences and the growth of omics databases have accelerated to study TEs and now considered evolutionary signatures. TEs are different in both structure and functions. TEs often affect either its host genome size or interact with other genes resulting in gene silencing and modified gene regulation and networks. Several functional genes have been identified by the action of TEs. Plants have capable to use TEs as promotors and enhancers to drive the epigenetic mechanism in a tissue-specific manner. These physiological functions have been challenging to dissect due to the lack of sufficient genetic information and lack of focused research. The different functions displayed by plants are genetically regulated, which opens up opportunities in areas such as genomic evolutions and epigenetic modification. Indeed, understanding of TEs contribution in the genome of plants is indispensable to assess the diversity of evolutionary adaptability in plant taxa. In view of that, in this study, we review the TEs applications and discuss the value of genetic information in plants. TEs’ genomic information has a significant value in high throughput research including forward genetics and reverse genetics. We discuss the current strategies in utilizing TEs for the genetic dissection of plants. This review will show the opportunities to utilize different TEs databases and increase knowledge TEs.