Cooperation, competition and enforcement in transposon evolution
2026-08-12
Transposons are powerful drivers of genome evolution, but we lack a clear understanding of how these selfish genetic elements evolve and co-evolve with their hosts. Here, we develop a new general model of transposon–host co-evolution that incorporates key details of transposon and host biology. Our model reveals that the way that transposons replicate is critical for their evolutionary prognosis. Publicly-replicating transposons (such as DNA transposons), which cooperatively share their replication machinery, are predicted to be self-limiting. However, privately-replicating transposons (such as long interspersed nuclear elements, or LINEs), which do not replicate cooperatively, are under continual selection to increase their duplication rate even to the point of host extinction, a so-called tragedy of the commons. Neither selection against transposons’ deleterious effects nor exploitation by parasitic elements is sufficient to prevent host extinction. Instead, our analysis shows that only active suppression by hosts avoids population collapse. In particular, suppression must act post-transcriptionally in order to prevent continuous escalation of the transposon–host genetic conflict. We argue that only with host enforcement of transposons can complex life exist.