Toxin-Antidote Elements Across the Tree of Life

Author:

Burga Alejandro1,Ben-David Eyal23,Kruglyak Leonid2

Affiliation:

1. Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA), Vienna BioCenter (VBC), 1030 Vienna, Austria;

2. Department of Human Genetics, Department of Biological Chemistry, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA;

3. Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Institute for Medical Research Israel-Canada, The Hebrew University School of Medicine, Jerusalem 91120, Israel;

Abstract

In life's constant battle for survival, it takes one to kill but two to conquer. Toxin-antitoxin or toxin-antidote (TA) elements are genetic dyads that cheat the laws of inheritance to guarantee their transmission to the next generation. This seemingly simple genetic arrangement—a toxin linked to its antidote—is capable of quickly spreading and persisting in natural populations. TA elements were first discovered in bacterial plasmids in the 1980s and have recently been characterized in fungi, plants, and animals, where they underlie genetic incompatibilities and sterility in crosses between wild isolates. In this review, we provide a unified view of TA elements in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms and highlight their similarities and differences at the evolutionary, genetic, and molecular levels. Finally, we propose several scenarios that could explain the paradox of the evolutionary origin of TA elements and argue that these elements may be key evolutionary players and that the full scope of their roles is only beginning to be uncovered.

Publisher

Annual Reviews

Subject

Genetics

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