dictyNews Volume 39 Number 21

Published in

· 10 months ago

dictyNews 
Electronic Edition 
Volume 39, number 21 
July 26, 2013 

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========= 
Abstracts 
========= 

 
Selfish DNA: a pharmaceutical perspective 

Thomas Winckler 
Department of Pharmaceutical Biology, Institute of Pharmacy,  
University of Jena, Germany 

 
Pharmazie 68: 467Ð473 (2013) 

Almost 25 years ago, Theo Dingermann published the discovery of a  
new mobile genetic element in the unicellular microbe Dictyostelium  
discoideum in the journal Science. An interesting property of this new  
molecular parasite, the Dictyostelium Repetitive Element (DRE), was  
that all integrations were found approximately 50 base pairs (bp)  
upstream of transfer RNA (tRNA) genes in the D. discoideum genome,  
thus implying an active targeting mechanism to avoid the disruption of  
host cell genes by the retrotransposition process. Since then, the  
facultative multicellular Òsocial amoebaÓ D. discoideum has become a  
popular model for analyzing complex cellular functions such as cell  
movement, chemotaxis, phagocytosis, and cell differentiation, important  
areas of biomedical research that are often hard to investigate in cells  
from Òhigher organismsÓ including humans. Therefore, progress in the  
development of methods to study Dictyostelium biology has also  
provoked research on transposable elements in this organism. Early  
work on the DRE element suggested that studying its molecular  
mechanism of site-specific integration might promote human gene  
therapy technology through the design of integrating gene transfer  
vectors with low intrinsic genotoxic potential. In this article, I will briefly  
review the original research performed on the DRE transposable  
element in the Dingermann lab and report on how the emergence of  
genomics technologies and the development of tools to analyze de  
novo retrotransposition events in D. discoideum cells will expand our  
knowledge of DRE biology in the future 

Dedicated to Prof. Dr. Theo Dingermann, Frankfurt, on the occasion  
of his 65th birthday. 

  
Submitted by Thomas Winckler [t.winckler@uni-jena.de] 
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[End dictyNews, volume 39, number 21]