Genetic Breakthroughs— Their Implications for You and Your Health (Collection)

2. Varieties of mobile DNA

Mobile DNA comes in many different flavors, the most common of which are DNA transposons and two main varieties of retrotransposons (Figure 2.1) (Goodier and Kazazian, 2008). Another curious observation is that even though mobile DNA is present in every living organism, its proportion of the genome of an organism may vary from a few percent in yeast and pufferfish to a huge 60–70% in maize and barley (Table 2.1) (Kazazian, 2004). In fact, there is a striking direct correlation between genome size and the percentage of any genome that is mobile DNA. Thus, the pufferfish genome is quite small, while the human and all other sequenced genomes of mammals (Table 2.1) contain ~50% mobile DNA and are comparatively large. On ...