Cedric Feschotte<\/a>, the Barbara McClintock Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and a senior author of the study \u201cBC200 was itself created from a mobile element but has retained its mobility and yet it is also clearly serving a cellular function. Somehow evolution hasn\u2019t been able to untangle these two things,\u201d Feschotte said.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\nCo-authors include Cheng Sun, professor of evolutionary genomics at Capital Normal University in Beijing, China; and Ellen Pritham, who was an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Arlingtonwhen the work was done.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The researchers first identified BC200 in 2010, when Feschotte was a faculty member at University of Texas, Arlington, and Cheng was a postdoctoral researcher in Feschotte\u2019s and Pritham\u2019s joint lab. At the time, Cheng was investigating human transposons in viral genomes using specialized software and genome databases, and he found two insertions of BC200 in a molluscum contagiosum virus (MCV), an infectiousbut largely benign human poxvirus that causes warts. Though the team recognized the importance of the discovery, they didn\u2019t write a paper on it at the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Feschotte and Cheng recently met at a conference, and Cheng mentioned that he and his graduatestudent, Pu Gao, the paper\u2019s first author, had resurrected the project. \u201cI can\u2019t believe we never got scooped on this,\u201d Feschotte said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A progenitor of BC200 was co-opted in a common primate ancestor from an ancient transposon roughly 40 million years ago and has jumped to MCV twice within modern human history (since the era of Homo sapiens), about 100,000 years ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There have been a few other documented cases of transposable elements in other species inserting in viruses, including in the late 1980s when researchers in a lab setting documented for the first time the insertion of a transposon from moth cells they were studying in culture to a baculovirus, known to infect insects.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was to my knowledge the first clear example of a transposon escaping its host genome to hop onto a virus,\u201d Feschotte said, \u201cwhich led to the idea that perhaps if viruses can cross species boundaries, then you may have a mechanism for the spread of these elements across species.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then in 2007, a group from Japan discovered a transposable element embedded in a rodent poxvirus, though the transposon originated in a snake, raising the likelihood that the virus also infected reptiles, though it had never been studied. \u201cI think [at the time] it was the first and only case of a clearly vertebrate transposable element escaping into a virus in the wild,\u201d Feschotte said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
BC200 is only found in humans and related primates and was discovered in the late 1980s as anabundant non-coding RNA in human neurons. Although BC200\u2019s physiological function is poorly understood, evidence suggests it may be involved in regulating the translation of neuronal messenger RNAsinto proteins. It is also found in low levels in germ cells \u2013 sperm and eggs \u2013 making it potentially capable of generating inheritable insertions in other areas of\u00a0the genome.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The researchers also suspect that it jumped in skin cells since these are the only cells known to be infected by MCV. The gene is also aberrantly expressed in some tumors and overexpressed in the brains of Alzheimer\u2019s disease patients, suggesting its jumping ability could also play roles in these diseases.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Feschotte said he and colleagues would like to explore whether the molluscum contagiosum virus\u00a0is using BC200 for its own purpose of manipulating human host cells. They are also interested in better understanding the gene\u2019s role in disease, such as breast and other types of tumors, where it is abnormally expressed, and whether it is jumping in cancer cells and causing mutations.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Nobel Prize winner Barbara McClintock, Class of 1923, M.A. 1925, Ph.D. 1927, for whom Feschotte\u2019sprofessorship is named, discovered transposons in the 1940s.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the University of Texas, Arlington, and Cornell.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scientists found a human genetic element in a poxvirus and discovered it was both an important gene for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":908232,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[49,48,66],"class_list":["post-908231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/908231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=908231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/908231\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/908232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=908231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=908231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=908231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}