Figure 1

Schematic diagram of the pFOXC plasmids. The pFOXC retroplasmids are approximately 1.9 kb linear, double-stranded DNA molecules that have a clothespin structure. They possess a covalently closed hairpin and iterative terminal repeats (black boxes) with a 5'-linked protein (circle). The plasmids have a single open reading frame (ORF) encoding a reverse transcriptase (RT; open box). The location of conserved domains characteristic of reverse transcriptases is indicated by shaded regions 1, 2, 2a, 3-7, with domain 2a also being conserved among non-long terminal repeat (non-LTR) retrotransposons. Details concerning the plasmid ORFs and iterative repeats are given in Table 1.