Switching the mechanism of mating type switching: a domesticated transposase supplants a domesticated homing endonuclease
- 1Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, and Biochemistry Department, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA;
- 2California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences and Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
Abstract
Programmed DNA rearrangements are critical for the development of many organisms and, intriguingly, can be catalyzed by domesticated mobile genetic elements. In this issue of Genes & Development, Barsoum and colleagues (pp. 33–44) demonstrate that, in the budding yeast Kluyveromyces lactis, a DNA rearrangement associated with mating type switching requires a domesticated transposase and occurs through a mechanism distinct from that in the related yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Thus, mechanisms for mating type switching have evolved multiple times, indicating the relative ease with which mobile genetic elements can be captured.
Keywords
Footnotes
-
↵3 Corresponding author.
E-MAIL jrine{at}berkeley.edu; FAX (510) 555-2768.
-
Article is online at http://www.genesdev.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gad.1886310.
- Copyright © 2010 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
