Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Pi W
PROVIDER: S-EPMC2919959 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Jul
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20100706 29
Retrotransposons including endogenous retroviruses and their solitary long terminal repeats (LTRs) compose >40% of the human genome. Many of them are located in intergenic regions far from genes. Whether these intergenic retrotransposons serve beneficial host functions is not known. Here we show that an LTR retrotransposon of ERV-9 human endogenous retrovirus located 40-70 kb upstream of the human fetal gamma- and adult beta-globin genes serves a long-range, host function. The ERV-9 LTR contains ...[more]