Beneficial Jumping Gene Discovered (Science Daily)
Transposons are DNA elements that can multiply and change their location within an organism's genome. Discovered in the 1940s, for years they were thought to be unimportant and were called "junk DNA." Also referred to as transposable elements and jumping genes, they are snippets of "selfish DNA" that spread in their host genomes serving no other biological purpose but their own existence.
Now Tokuji Tsuchiya and Thomas Eulgem, geneticists at the University of California, Riverside, challenge that understanding. They report online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have discovered a transposon that benefits its host organisms.
Image shows the differences between a pathogen-infected leaf (top) from a wild type plant (where the adaptive transposon insertion mechanism involving COPIA-R7 is intact) and two mutants (where this mechanism is compromised). The wild type plant remains healthy. The two mutants (middle and bottom) get sick and exhibit disease symptoms caused by the fungal pathogen. (Credit: Eulgem Lab, UC Riverside.)
