Brendan Maher | Aug 19, 2001 | 2 min read
Likening his discovery to a paleontologist unearthing a new dinosaur species, Vladimir Kapitonov, a staff scientist at the Genetic Information Research Institute, recently revealed a new class of transposable elements in eukaryotes. These jumping genes use rolling circle replication--an ancient process characteristic of some plasmid replication in bacteria--to copy and insert itself throughout entire genomes (V.V. Kapitonov, J. Jurka, "Rolling circle transposons in eukaryotes," Proceedings of th