An endogenous retrovirus presumed to have been endogenized or relocated recently in a marsupial, the red-necked wallaby

Abstract

An albino infant wallaby was born to a mother with the wild-type body color. PCR and sequencing analyses of TYR (encoding tyrosinase, which is essential for melanin biosynthesis) of this albino wallaby revealed a 7.1-kb-long DNA fragment inserted in the first exon. Because the fragment carried long terminal repeats, we assumed it to be a copy of an endogenous retrovirus, which we named walb. We cloned other walb copies residing in the genomes of this species and another wallaby species. The copies exhibited length variation, and the longest copy (>8.0 kb) contained open reading frames whose deduced amino acid sequences were well aligned with those of gag, pol, and env of retroviruses. It is not known through which of the following likely processes the walb copy was inserted into TYR: endogenization (infection of a germline cell by an exogenous virus), reinfection (infection by a virus produced from a previously endogenized provirus), or retrotransposition (intracellular relocation of a provirus). In any case, the insertion into TYR is considered to have been a recent event on an evolutionary timescale because albino mutant alleles generally do not persist for long because of their deleterious effects in wild circumstances.