Aurora, a non-mobile retrotransposon in Drosophila melanogaster heterochromatin

A novel retrotransposon, aurora, containing 324 by long terminal repeats (LTRs) was detected in Drosophila melanogaster as a 5 kb insertion in the heterochromatic Stellate gene. This insertion causes a 5 bp duplication of the integration site. Southern analysis and in situ hybridization data show that all detectable copies of aurora are immobilized in the D. melanogaster heterochromatin. However, mobile copies of aurora were revealed in the cuchromatin of D. simulans. The element was also found in various species of the melanogaster subgroup and in the D. virilis genome.The nucleotide sequence data reported in this paper will appear in the EMBL, GenBank and DDBJ Nucleotide Sequence Databases under the accession numbers X70361 and X70362