An international team of researchers has mapped the “jumping genes,” formally named transposable elements, or transposons, in corn, says UC-Davis. “The discovery could ultimately benefit the breeding and production of maize, one of the world’s most important crops.”
Transposons, discovered in the 1940s, are DNA sequences that can change location within a genome. The jumping genes make up more than 80 percent of the corn genome and nearly 50 percent of the human genome. Two UC-Davis researchers worked with university and genome technology companies to create a new reference genome that includes the many complex repeat regions for corn. Graduate student Michelle Stitzer developed methods to identify the location of transposons even when they jump into each other.
As UC-Davis says in semi-scientific jargon, “Transposons can regulate and change the expression of nearby genes depending on where they land in the genome.” Various transposon insertions confer drought resistance, change the time when the corn plant flowers, and enhance corn’s ability to grow in hostile soils. UC-Davis corn geneticist Jeff Ross-Ibarra says that with the corn genome fully sequenced, the next realm of research, a step beyond the role of genes, could be determining the role of individual transposons.
To read the Nature article about mapping the jumping genes, click here.