Fruit fly gene from 'out of nowhere' is discovered
...y have developed from a piece of DNA junk called a transposable element (also known as a "jumping gene"), which ma...next to and inserts it in the new location. Often, transposable elements appear to have no function or may be harmful and are eliminated by natural selection, but r...Disease-free mosquito bred to disease-carrier can have all disease-free progeny
...s1, an enzyme isolated from the housefly that is a transposable element (TE) -- a piece of genetic material that moves around. Mos1 can also move anything attached to it and can duplicate itself and whatever is attached to it, such as a gene that directs the dengue virus to stop replication. The research report...Exploring the dark matter of the genome
...ional elements, such as small RNAs that neutralize transposable elements, or transposons -- DNAs similar to viruse...dibly repeat-rich," says Smith, "and most of it is transposable elements that have been chewed up and fragmented." Susan Celniker emphasizes that transposable el...Genome of yellow fever/dengue fever mosquito sequenced
...n the United States, Spain, and France to annotate transposable elements (TEs) in the Ae. aegypti genome. TEs are ...aboratory, uncovered and described more than 1,000 transposable elements, which occupy approximately 50 percent of the entire Ae. aegypti genome. For example, a tra...LSU professor involved in genome sequencing of the first marsupial
...ifferences as well. In addition, they report that transposable elements appear to have been involved in a specific biological function, perhaps regulating gene expression. Thus, the mobile elements that are typically thought of as "junk DNA" have played a creative role in genome evolution spreading key geneti...The opossum genome sequence casts light on evolution, immunity and disease
...D.D., and Jurka, J. 2007. Evolutionary dynamics of transposable elements in the short-tailed opossum Monodelphis domestica. Genome Res. doi:10.1101/gr.6070707 3. Colonizing colossal chromosomes The opossum autosomes (non-sex chromosomes) are unusually large--up to three times longer than the largest hum...New protein super-family discovered with critical functions for animal life
...earchers. "Many DANGER proteins are surrounded by transposable elements, which are pieces of DNA around genes tha...," Patterson explains. "DANGER genes also contain transposable elements that may participate in the genetic disturbances associated with chronic myeleoid leukemia....Does evolution select for faster evolvers?
...e because bacteria and viruses constantly exchange transposable chunks of DNA between species, thus making it possible for life forms to evolve faster than they would if they relied only on sexual selection or random genetic mutations. "We have developed the first exact solution of a mathematical model of evolu...Taking 'chips' to the next level of gene hunting
... Boeke and his team have focused particularly on transposable elements, segments of DNA that hop around from chr...an genome, which contains hundreds of thousands of transposable elements of which perhaps a few hundred are actively moving around, the yeast genome contains only a...NSF awards UGA $4.1 million grant to study so-called 'jumping genes' in maize
...n to the University of Georgia to identify all the transposable elements (TE's) in maize and to generate an annota... their genomes. For instance, half of human DNA is transposable elements, while in some plants, the amount is more than 90 percent. About 80 percent of maize genomi...Sunflower speciation highlights roles for transposable elements in evolution
...massive proliferation of genetic entities known as transposable elements. The findings are reported by Mark Ungere...ies are associated with a massive proliferation of transposable genetic elements that has occurred independently in the genome of each hybrid species. Transposable ...American Andrew Z. Fire shares Nobel Prize for discovering RNAi
... 1983 for her work on jumping genes, also known as transposable elements. Fire was employed by the Carnegie Institution for 17 years. He joined the faculty of Stanford University in November 2003 in order to be closer to family. The Tale behind the Discovery In 1997 the Fire-Mello team found that by specially...News tips from the Journal of Neuroscience
...ellular processes. The authors generated >2500 transposable P-element insertion lines in which the yeast upstream activating sequence promoter was randomly inserted into the fly genome. After selecting lines with altered synapse morphology, they identified four in which the P-element insertion was positioned ...Pathway toward gene silencing described in plants
...thylation is to turn off repetitive genes, such as transposable elements that can move or spread throughout a genome and disrupt other gene functions if left unchecked. There is also interest in DNA methylation because understanding how some genes are selectively silenced and how silenced alleles can be turned on...Where 'jumping genes' fear to tread
...ts (greater than 10 kilobases in length) that lack transposable elements. His team identified 860 such sequences ...cause it is a marsupial that has a similar load of transposable elements compared to mice and humans but is evolutionarily distant from the two species. In contras...The genetic origins of corn on the cob
...molecular genetics. The former included our use of transposable elements or 'jumping genes'--discovered at Cold Spring Harbor by [Nobel laureate] Barbara McClintock--to 'tag' the ramosa1 gene. That enabled us to isolate the gene and determine its DNA sequence for a variety of other experiments." "As corn was bein...LSU scientists develop new theory about human genome evolution by tracking 'stealth' DNA elements
...e. Their study focused on the origin and spread of transposable elements in the genome, many of which are known to...copies, giving rise to the most abundant family of transposable elements in the human genome, known as Alu elements. The study provides the first strong evidence f...'Jumping genes' contribute to the uniqueness of individual brains
... dismissed as useless gibberish or "junk" DNA, the transposable L1 elements were thought to be intracellular parasites or leftovers from our distant evolutionary past. It has been known for a long time that L1 elements are active in testis and ovaries, which explains how they potentially play a role in evolution...Study reveals candidate targets for anti-retroviral therapeutics
...udding yeast, these mobile elements (called Ty or transposable yeast elements) encode proteins that are homologs of retroviral proteins. The proteins encoded by Ty elements and the steps of the life cycle in yeast are similar to the proteins encoded by retroviruses and their life cycles in animal cells. Scien......ssing pie ce of genetic material caused by another transposable element jumping out and dragging lots of material along with it. "With such a deletion of material, this gene is basically gone, so we knew it couldn't possibly function at all," Lai says. Both kinds of mutations resulted in the formation of the sa...