Advancing the Study of ‘Jumping’ Genes

Mobile genetic elements (MGEs), or transposable elements (TEs), are a kind of mobile genetic material; in nature, they can change places in within the genome of a species, or even move across different genomes. It’s been suggested that half of the human genome is derived from MGEs. While most of the MGEs in the human genome are thought to have become inactive over time, a few others have been linked to a wide variety of disorders.

Our understanding of MGEs has been limited by a lack of good methods to study them. However, recent work has described a…