The bright side of transposons in crop evolution. Briefings in Functional Genomics

The past decades have revealed an unexpected yet prominent role of so-called ‘junk DNA ’ in the regulation of gene expression, thereby challenging our view of the mechanisms underlying phenotypic evolution. In particular, several mechanisms through which transposable elements (TEs) participate in functional genome diversity have been de-picted, bringing to light the ‘TEs bright side’. However, the relative contribution of those mechanisms and, more gen-erally, the importance of TE-based polymorphisms on past and present phenotypic variation in crops species remain poorly understood. Here, we review current knowledge on both issues, and discuss how analyses of mas-sively parallel sequencing data combined with statistical methodologies and functional validations will help unravel-ling the impact of TEs on crop evolution in a near future