An intriguing relationship between teleost Rex3 retroelement and environmental temperature

The movement and accumulation of transposable elements (TEs) exert a great influence on the host genome, e.g. determining architecture and genome size, providing a substrate for homologous recombination and DNA rearrangements. TEs are also known to be responsive and susceptible to environmental changes. However, the correlation between environmental conditions and the sequence evolution of TEs is still an unexplored field of research. Among vertebrates, teleosts represent a successful group of animals adapted to a wide range of different environments and their genome is constituted by a rich repertoire of TEs. The Rex3 retroelement is a lineage-specific non-LTR retrotransposon and thus represents a valid candidate for performing comparative sequence analyses between species adapted to diverse temperature conditions. Partial reverse transcriptase sequences of the Rex3 retroelement belonging to 39 species of teleosts were investigated through phylogenetic analysis to evaluate whether the species' adaptation to different environments led to the evolution of different Rex3 temperature-related variants. Our findings highlight an intriguing behaviour of the analysed sequences, showing clustering of Rex3 sequences isolated from species living in cold waters (Arctic and Antarctic regions and cold waters of temperate regions) compared with those isolated from species living in warm waters. This is the first evidence to our knowledge of a correlation between environmental temperature and Rex3 retroelement evolution.