Hillary Sussman | Jun 15, 2003 | 6 min read
Courtesy of Ivan Rayment CAUGHT IN MID HOP: Structure of the Tn5 transposase/DNA complex No one believed Barbara McClintock in 1951 when she first described DNA that "jumped" from site to site within maize chromosomes, altering the expression of genes near the sites of integration. In due course, these transposable elements, or transposons, were found to be ubiquitous in nature, and 30 years later McClintock won the Nobel Prize. Today transposons have gone from molecular oddity to molec