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dictyNews Volume 39 Number 21
dictyNews
Electronic Edition
Volume 39, number 21
July 26, 2013
Please submit abstracts of your papers as soon as they have been
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Abstracts
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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]
