Retroviral diversity of laboratory and wild mice M. musculus domesticus

Abstract

The sensitivity and cost-effectiveness of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies has transformed almost every biological discipline, allowing to address questions whose answers seemed out of reach just a few years ago. One such area is the inventory and analysis of endogenous retroviruses of non-human origin. PCR-amplification and low-throughput Sanger-sequencing generally detects only retroviral variants that predominate in a given species or population, and rare sequence variants cannot easily be detected. NGS technologies, in contrast, allow to survey diversity and distribution of retroviruses among individuals, populations, and species. Our poster will describe an analysis of targeted murine retroviral sequences from five mouse samples.