A team of researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) has discovered that transposons, small DNA sequences that travel through the genomes, can silence the genes adjacent to them by ...

The birth and death of genes is central to adaptive evolution, yet the underlying genome dynamics remain elusive. The availability of closely related complete genome sequences helps to follow changes ...

A research team has clarified a mechanism of how retrotransposons, genetic elements that can 'jump around' chromosomes and are known drivers of evolution, preferentially insert in the centromere. A ...

A joint research group team led by Sayuri Tsukahara and Tetsuji Kakutani of the University of Tokyo has clarified a mechanism of how retrotransposons, genetic elements that can "jump around" ...

Safeguards for maintaining the integrity of chromosomes during cell growth and division can fail, and a cell may find itself trying to divide into two daughter cells with a loose chromosomal fragment ...

Chromosomal rearrangements, such as chromosome segment inversions, may affect the epigenetic landscape as well as gene expression. Different kinds of chromosome segment inversions have been found in ...

Our chromosomes are much longer than the space in which they are packaged in the cell. Chromosome compaction is on the order of several thousand fold, yet these chromosomes have to be unraveled every ...

The DNA vital to the life of a cell is packaged in chromosomes, and a variety of checkpoints, repair mechanisms, and other cellular safeguards exist to maintain the integrity of the chromosomes during ...