Fragmented landscapes of mobile transposable element families bolster the diversity of large-effect alleles in Arabidopsis

Authors

Petit, A., Caillieux, E., Reignier, M., Gueye, N. A., De Oliveira, L., Xu, C., Cordier, C., Sezginmert, D., Colot, V., Baduel, P.

Abstract

Transposable elements (TEs) are powerful endogenous mutagens, but our understanding of the 'mobilome' - the set of mobile TEs at the species level - has largely been shaped by the study of a single reference genome. To overcome this reference-centric view, we produced long-read genome assemblies for 91 Arabidopsis thaliana strains and performed a reference-free pangenomic graph analysis of structural variants. Our analysis revealed the presence of twice as many TE families with recent mobilization activity as previously described. These >200 newly identified TE families are ancestral, with a third experimentally shown to be mobile and although they are often characterized by the presence of full-length copies in only a few rather than in most strains, they nonetheless contribute significantly to the generation of large-effect alleles. These findings uncover a much more fragmented and impactful mobilome than previously documented and highlight how pangenome approaches dramatically improve the study of genetic diversity.

Preprint server: bioRxiv
The authors list and abstract were imported from bioRxiv on 18 Oct 2026.

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