The same configuration of Ty elements promotes different types and frequencies of rearrangements in different yeast strains

Summary We examined Ty-mediated genomic rearrangements in three related mitotically dividing haploid yeast strains having the same configuration of Ty elements in the CYC1-sup4 interval of chromosome X. Surprisingly, quite different types and frequencies of rearrangements were found in the three strains. In one strain we found only Ty-mediated deletions, which occurred with a frequency of about 1×10^-6. Another strain yielded similar deletions, but approximately one-third of these were accompanied by adjacent Ty-mediated inversions. A third strain was found to have an extremely high rate of inversion/reinversion between two of the three Ty elements. This rate was conservatively estimated to be 1.4±0.2×10^-2 per cell per generation, which is at least 2 orders of magnitude higher than previously reported values for Ty-mediated rearrangements. These data provide evidence that local regions of the genome can, in some cases, be much more fluid than had been previously believed.