Identification of diversity-generating retroelements in host-associated and environmental genomes: prevalence, diversity, and roles

Our research sheds light on the widespread prevalence of DGRs within environments and taxa, and supports the DGR phylogenetic divergence in different organisms. These variations might also occur in their structures since some cassette architectures were common in specific underrepresented phyla. In addition, we suggest that VRs could be found in domains different to the CLec, which should be further explored for organisms in scarcely studied environments.