RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Massive bursts of transposable element activity in Drosophila JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 010231 DO 10.1101/010231 A1 Robert Kofler A1 Viola Nolte A1 Christian Schlötterer YR 2014 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/10/10/010231.abstract AB The evolutionary dynamics of transposable element (TE) insertions have been of continued interest since TE activity has important implications for genome evolution and adaptation. Here, we infer the transposition dynamics of TEs by comparing their abundance in natural D. melanogaster and D. simulans populations. Sequencing pools of more than 550 South African flies to at least 320-fold coverage, we determined the genome wide TE insertion frequencies in both species. We show that 46 (49%) TE families in D. melanogaster and 44 (47%) in D. simulans experienced a recent burst of activity. The bursts of activity affected different TE families in the two species. While in D. melanogaster retrotransposons predominated, DNA transposons showed higher activity levels in D. simulans. We propose that the observed TE dynamics are the outcome of the demographic history of the two species, with habitat expansion triggering a period of rapid evolution.