Unity in Transposition Reactions

摘要

The process of transposition, in which pieces of DNA move around the genome, was made famous by Barbara McClintock's discovery of "jumping genes" and the surprising plasticity of DNA (I). Other biological transactions also make use of this process: the acquisition of bacterial genes for antibiotic resistance, the replication of certain bacteriophages, the integration of retroviruses, and the intracellular movement of retroviral-like elements. New evidence points to unexpected parallels among these many transposition events: They all occur by similar DNA breakage and joining reactions. Moreover, the structures of transposition proteins from very different biological sources have remarkable overall structural similarity, even though they lack extensive primary sequence homology.