Barbara McClintock is often portrayed as an insular character. However, she was in fact a well-recognized figure by the time she discovered transposable elements. During her doctoral and post-doctoral ...

For more than three decades, researchers studying genomes have relied on foundational resources such as Repbase and, more ...

Transposable elements (TEs) are mobile DNA elements that comprise almost 50% of mammalian genomic sequence. TEs are capable of making additional copies of themselves that integrate into new positions ...

Researchers have created a new way to reconstruct the evolutionary history of complex plant genomes by analyzing genetic traces left by transposable elements. The technique revealed that modern ...

Ancient viruses are embedded everywhere in the human genome. Estimates range, but it's thought that about eight percent of the human genome could be made up of these ancient retroviruses, which are ...

The human genome, an intricate tapestry of genetic information for life, has proven to be a treasure trove of strange features. Among them are segments of DNA that can "jump around" and move within ...

Most lethal mutations in wild fruit flies are driven by newly transferred jumping genes, not small DNA errors, according to a new study from Duke University. The findings, published in PLOS Biology, ...

Heterochromatin, sometimes known as the “dark side of the genome,” is a poorly studied fraction of DNA that makes up about half of our genetic material. For more than 50 years scientists have puzzled ...

There are probably around 20,000 genes in the human genome that code for protein, and cells have to transcribe DNA sequences into RNA, which is then processed before it is translated into proteins by ...