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Abstract

Mobile genetic elements can be found in almost all genomes. Possibly the most common nonautonomous mobile genetic elements in bacteria are repetitive extragenic palindromic doublets forming hairpins (REPINs) that can occur hundreds of times within a genome. The sum of all REPINs in a genome can be viewed as an evolving population because REPINs replicate and mutate. In contrast to most other biological populations, we know the exact composition of the REPIN population and the sequence of each member of the population. Here, we model the evolution of REPINs as quasispecies. We fit our quasispecies model to 10 different REPIN populations from 10 different bacterial strains and estimate effective duplication rates. Our estimated duplication rates range from ~5 3 1029 to 15 3 1029 duplications per bacterial generation per REPIN. The small range and the low level of the REPIN duplication rates suggest a universal trade-off between the survival of the REPIN population and the reduction of the mutational load for the host genome. The REPIN populations we investigated also possess features typical of other natural populations. One population shows hallmarks of a population that is going extinct, another population seems to be growing in size, and we also see an example of competition between two REPIN populations. © 2017 by the Genetics Society of America.