Nearly all organisms contain pieces of DNA that do not really belong to them. These "transposable elements", so called because they are capable of moving around within and between genomes, generally ...

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 ...

Species often experience a genetic bottleneck that diminishes genetic variation after speciation or introduction into a new area. Though bottlenecks in population size always reduce fitness and ...

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 ...