In order to balance out the physical exertion of the previous week I expect to spend the rest of this week in the lab working on cloning transposable elements. Transposable elements (TEs) are segments of DNA which can move, transpose, from one region of the genome to another. They were originally discovered by Barbara McClintok under the title of "jumping genes". These elements can cause unexplained changes in pehnotypes because of their influence on the product of transcription.
In the plant kingdom, systems have evolved to prevent these TEs from causing disturbances in the expression of genes. This system is called the siRNA generation pathway. I will not go into great detail here, but the idea is that from the abberant RNA transcript silencing structures are made which bind to the specific sequence of DNA from which the transcript came and effectively silence the segment, TE and all.
Because each family of TE behave differently, I hope to find some which are specific to the b1 locus in maize.
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