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Lisa Schneider, Peter Sarkies (MRC London Institue of Medical Sciences, London, UK; Imperial College London, London, UK;)
While transposable elements (TEs) are present all across the tree of life, the TE load varies vastly amongst eukaryotes. TEs can be viewed as genomic parasites due to their ability to survive through mobilisation and amplification. By influencing gene regulation and genomic architecture they contribute to genome variation and can cause mutations. To combat these deleterious effects, diverse mechanisms to suppress and prevent TE activation have evolved. Nevertheless, there is still an abundance of TEs found in many metazoan species potentially due their role as motors for evolution and major sources of genomic diversity. This points towards a linked evolution of TEs and their silencing pathways. We hypothesise that there is a correlation between the evolution of certain defence mechanisms and specific TEs. However, the rapid evolution of TEs make comparative genomics across widely separated species challenging. To investigate the evolution of TEs and the effects of silencing pathways we developed a network-based approach to visualize and interpret TE load across multiple genomes. We show that our method offers the potential to provide new measures of TE diversity across evolution.https://lms.mrc.ac.uk/research-group/transgenerational-epigenetic-inheritance-evolution/