Critical role of insertion preference for invasion trajectory of transposons

It is unclear how mobile DNA sequences (transposable elements, hereafter TEs) invade eukaryotic genomes and reach stable copy numbers, as transposition can decrease host fitness. This challenge is particularly stark early in the invasion of a TE family at which point hosts may lack the specialized machinery to repress the spread of these TEs. One possibility (in addition to the evolution of host regulation of TEs) is that TE families may evolve to preferentially insert into chromosomal regions that are less likely to impact host fitness. This may allow the mean TE copy number to grow while minimizing the risk for host population extinction. To test this, we constructed simulations to explore how the transposition probability and insertion preference of a TE family influence the evolution of mean TE copy number and host population size, allowing for extinction. We find that the effect of a TE family’s insertion preference depends on a host’s ability to regulate this TE family. Without host repression, a neutral insertion preference increases the frequency of and decreases the time to population extinction. With host repression, a preference for neutral insertions minimizes the cumulative deleterious load, increases population fitness, and, ultimately, avoids triggering an extinction vortex.