Retrotransposons and their Role in Plant—Genome Evolution

A large amount of description data now exists for wide variety retrotransposons in higher plants, but much less is known for molecular basis of the mechanisms of trancriptional activation and the frequency of their transposition activation during plant species evolution. Because the transposition is a replicative cycle which can eventually produce many copies comprising a large fraction of the plant genome this obviously has profound effects on the evolution of the structure of retrotransposon populations and the overall genome structure of each species.This review provides an insight on the structure, genomic organization, mechanisms involved in regulation of the expression, transposition, and evolution of the most widely distributed LTR retrotransposons in plants and especially within the Triticeae tribe, and discusses both their contributions to plant genome evolution and their use as genetic tools in plant biology.