ArticleNature communications2025
Double trouble: two retrotransposons triggered a cascade of invasions in Drosophila species within the last 50 years.
Article in Nature communications, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Updated Transposable Element Libraries forbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Lifestyles ofProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Retrovirus insertions in host transcripts trigger de novo piRNA immunity.The EMBO journal · 2026Article
- Rapid evolution and comparative analysis of piRNA clusters inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Recent horizontal transfer of transposable elements inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Historic transposon mobilisation waves create distinct pools of adaptive variants in a major crop pathogen.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The ongoing invasion of the endogenous retrovirusbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Phylogenetic Relatedness Does not Predict Patterns of Parallel Transcriptome Adaptation in Drosophila.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Spatiotemporal Tracking of Three Novel Transposable Element Invasions in Drosophila melanogaster over the Last 30 Years.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Double trouble: two retrotransposons triggered a cascade of invasions in Drosophila species within the last 50 years.Nature communications · 2025Article
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Abstract
Horizontal transfer of genetic material in eukaryotes has rarely been documented over short evolutionary timescales. Here, we show that two retrotransposons, Shellder and Spoink, invaded the genomes of multiple species of the melanogaster subgroup within the last 50 years. Through horizontal transfer, Spoink spread in D. melanogaster during the 1980s, while both Shellder and Spoink invaded D. simulans in the 1990s. Possibly following hybridization, D. simulans infected the island endemic species D. mauritiana (Mauritius) and D. sechellia (Seychelles) with both TEs after 1995. In the same approximate time-frame, Shellder also invaded D. teissieri, a species confined to sub-Saharan Africa. We find that the donors of Shellder and Spoink are likely American Drosophila species from the willistoni, cardini, and repleta groups. Thus, the described cascade of TE invasions could only become feasible after D. melanogaster and D. simulans extended their distributions into the Americas 200 years ago, likely aided by human activity. Our work reveals that cascades of TE invasions, likely initiated by human-mediated range expansions, could have an impact on the genomic and phenotypic evolution of geographically dispersed species. Within a few decades, TEs could invade many species, including island endemics, with distributions very distant from the donor of the TE.
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