Transposable elements (TEs) are major components of all vertebrate genomes that can cause deleterious insertions and genomic instability. However, depending on the specific genomic context of their insertion site, TE sequences can sometimes get positively selected, leading to what are called “exaptation” events. TE sequence exaptation constitutes an important source of novelties for gene, genome and organism evolution, giving rise to new regulatory sequences, protein-coding exons/genes and non-coding RNAs, which can play various roles beneficial to the host. In this review, we focus on the development of vertebrates, which present many derived traits such as bones, adaptive immunity and a complex brain. We illustrate how TE-derived sequences have given rise to developmental innovations in vertebrates and how they thereby contributed to the evolutionary success of this lineage.

中文翻译：

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脊椎动物发育中转座子衍生的序列

转座因子（TEs）是所有脊椎动物基因组的主要组成部分，会导致有害的插入和基因组不稳定。但是，根据其插入位点的特定基因组环境，有时可以肯定地选择TE序列，从而导致所谓的“突变”事件。TE序列的保留构成基因，基因组和生物进化的新颖性的重要来源，产生了新的调控序列，蛋白质编码外显子/基因和非编码RNA，它们可以发挥有益于宿主的多种作用。在这篇综述中，我们专注于脊椎动物的发展，脊椎动物表现出许多衍生特征，例如骨骼，适应性免疫和复杂的大脑。