Silencing of jumping genes in pollen

Tuesday, February 10, 2009 - 09:57 in Biology & Nature

Scientists at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC), in Portugal, are to date the only research group in the world capable of isolating the sperm cells in the pollen grain of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. This technique was crucial in a study to be published in the latest issue of the journal Cell, which describes how mobile sequences of DNA (called transposable elements) are silenced in the sperm cells, thus ensuring suppression of the mutagenic effects of these DNA elements.

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