TY - JOUR A1 - Nguyen, Alison H. A1 - Wang, Weixiang A1 - Chong, Emily A1 - Chatla, Kamalakar A1 - Bachtrog, Doris T1 - Transposable element accumulation drives size differences among polymorphic Y Chromosomes in Drosophila Y1 - 2022/06/01 JF - Genome Research JO - Genome Research SP - 1074 EP - 1088 DO - 10.1101/gr.275996.121 VL - 32 IS - 6 UR - http://genome.cshlp.org/content/32/6/1074.abstract N2 - Y Chromosomes of many species are gene poor and show low levels of nucleotide variation, yet they often display high amounts of structural diversity. Dobzhansky cataloged several morphologically distinct Y Chromosomes in Drosophila pseudoobscura that differ in size and shape, but the molecular causes of their large size differences are unclear. Here we use cytogenetics and long-read sequencing to study the sequence content of polymorphic Y Chromosomes in D. pseudoobscura. We show that Y Chromosomes differ almost twofold in size, ranging from 30 to 60 Mb. Most of this size difference is caused by a handful of active transposable elements (TEs) that have recently expanded on the largest Y Chromosome, with different elements being responsible for Y expansion on differently sized D. pseudoobscura Y's. We show that Y Chromosomes differ in their heterochromatin enrichment and expression of Y-enriched TEs, and also influence expression of dozens of autosomal and X-linked genes. The same helitron element that showed the most drastic amplification on the largest Y in D. pseudoobscura independently amplified on a polymorphic large Y Chromosome in Drosophila affinis, suggesting that some TEs are inherently more prone to become deregulated on Y Chromosomes. ER -