Synonyms
Transposon is a short and most commonly used term for transposable element. Transposons are also referred to as mobile genetic elements, which is a wide category including the classical transposable elements, integrating viruses, mobile introns and some other products of DNA recombination. Transposons are also called “jumping genes”, for their ability to move.
Definition
Transposons are discrete segments of DNA that have the distinctive ability to move and replicate within genomes. Transposons were discovered in the 1940's by Barbara McClintock (who later was awarded with the Nobel Prize for this discovery) in the maize genome and have since been found ubiquitously in essentially all living organisms. The process of element movement is generally called transposition and can contribute to insertional mutagenesis, altered gene expression and recombination. Transposons make up significant fractions of genomes; for example, about 45% of the human genome is composed of sequences of...
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References
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© 2005 Springer-Verlag
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Ivics, Z., Walisko, O., Izsvák, Z. (2005). Transposons. In: Encyclopedic Reference of Genomics and Proteomics in Molecular Medicine. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg . https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-29623-9_1860
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-29623-9_1860
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-44244-8
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