We are interested in understanding the dynamics of transposable elements in populations. Species differ in TE content, diversity and activity. However the drivers of this variation are still unknown.

The first step to understand the population dynamics of TEs is to identify them. There are several tools available to identify TEs de novo. However, a manual curation step of the raw libraries produced by these tools is needed. We have developed MCHelper to automatically curate TE libraries. We are applying MCHelper to diverse species to identify and compare their TE content.