Many living organisms suffer from parasites, which use the hosts’ resources for their own purposes. The problem of parasitism occurs at all levels right down to the DNA scale. Genomes may contain up ...

Researchers from UNSW Sydney have discovered that a particular transposable element, or jumping gene, in the genome has a profound effect on the immune response to virus infection. The findings in ...

Transposable elements are DNA sequences that are capable of changing their genome position by cut and paste or copy and paste through the enzyme transposase. This ability can be harmful for hosts if ...

Keith Slotkin, PhD, first became interested in transposable elements (TE), colloquially known as “jumping genes,” as an undergraduate student. “They just broke all the rules,” he said in an interview ...

To understand how organisms are related, researchers use molecular information to construct phylogenetic trees. Most of the time, scientists use thousands of protein-coding sequences to determine ...

Viruses insert “transposable elements” into the genetic material of host cells to replicate. While cells’ defense mechanisms have learned to silence most of these viral insertions, a few “jumping ...