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In the late 1940s, she noticed something entirely unexpected, and her story shifted from a notable, albeit traditional, tale of scientific achievement to one tangled with misunderstanding and confusion. Her maize genes started jumping.Genes were meant to be static, beads on the chromosomal string. Indeed, her work in the 1930s seemed to verify this model — genes didn’t move between chromosomes, they had a fixed address, each a little city on a map. And yet, she saw, they moved. Some genes on maize chromosomes could shift position, and in the process, switch other genes on and off. In her eyes, this was a major discovery and seemed to suggest that the movement of genes could control the development of organisms.
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Dame Ottoline Leyser (Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge) talks to Brian Cox about her admiration for Nobel Prize winning geneticist, Barbara McClintock and explains the two great principles she uncovered.
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Prof. Susan Wessler introduces transposable elements (TEs); small movable pieces of DNA that can insert throughout the genome. She describes their discovery in maize by Barbara McClintock in the 1940's and their impact on the current study of genetics. Wessler goes on to provide more details about TEs and transposase, the enzyme that facilitates insertion of TEs into the target DNA.
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IV of IV: transposable elements II |
Amazingly, as much as 50% of a mammalian genome and much more of a plant genome can be made of TEs. In Part 2 of her talk, Wessler discusses work from her lab analyzing the impact of TEs on gene and genome evolution. By looking for and finding a TE currently undergoing rapid amplification, Wessler and her colleagues have been able to assess how a type of TE called a MITE can rapidly increase its copy number without killing its host, rice.
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Science
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Technology
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Engineering
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Mathematics
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Empowerment
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