Detection of Transposable Element Insertions in Arabidopsis Using Sequence Capture

Transposable elements (TEs) are repetitive DNA sequences that have the ability to mobilize in the genome and create major effect mutations. Despite the importance of transposition as a source of genetic novelty, we still know little about the rate, landscape, and consequences of TE mobilization. This situation stems in large part from the repetitive nature of TEs, which complicates their analysis. Moreover, TE mobilization is typically rare and therefore new TE (i.e., non-reference) insertions tend to be missed in small-scale population studies. This chapter describes a TE-sequence capture approach designed to identify transposition events for most of the TE families that are potentially active in Arabidopsis thaliana. We show that our TE-sequence capture design provides an efficient means to detect with high sensitivity and specificity insertions that are present at a frequency as low as 1/1000 within a DNA sample.