Duckweed differentially marks old and new transposons

Transposons, so-called jumping genes, are a threat to genomes, so plants work hard to prevent them from mobilizing and re-inserting into the genome. Spirodela polyrhiza, the most ancient member of the duckweed family, uses an understudied epigenetic mechanism to mark old transposons without DNA methylation, as researchers in the group of Arturo Marí-Ordóñez at the Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology (GMI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences show in a new study, published on March 5th in Genome Research.

A constant cat-and-mouse game is unfolding in all eukaryotic cells: Transposons, also known as jumping genes because they can move around the genome, threaten the cell’s genome by causing mutations and rearrangements. To defend their genomes, plants silence transposons by compacting the transposon-containing DNA, rendering it inaccessible to the cellular machinery. Arturo Marí-Ordóñez and his team now shed new light on transposon regulation in plants, by studying the defense system of the duckweed Spirodela polyrhiza.

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