Mobile DNA

Haig H. Kazazian, Jr. received his A.B. degree from Dartmouth College in 1959. He then attended Dartmouth Medical School, a two-year school at the time, and finished his M.D. degree at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. At Hopkins, he met his wife of nearly 50 years and married during his internship in Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota Hospital. After two years training in Minneapolis, he returned to Johns Hopkins for a two-year fellowship in genetics with Barton Childs, M.D. He then trained for two years in molecular biology in the lab of Harvey Itano, M.D., at the NIH. After a third year of Pediatric training at Johns Hopkins, he joined the faculty there in 1969. He rose through the ranks to become a full professor in 1977, and at that time, he headed the Pediatric Genetics Unit. In 1988, he became Director of the Center for Medical Genetics at Johns Hopkins.   After 25 years on the Hopkins faculty, he was recruited to the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine as Chair of the Department of Genetics in 1994. At Penn, he recruited 10 young faculty to the department. In 2006, he stepped down as department chair, but remained as the Seymour Gray Professor of Molecular Medicine in Genetics until 2010. In July 2010, he returned to Johns Hopkins as a Professor in the Institute of Genetic Medicine. Dr. Kazazian is still heavily involved in molecular genetic research, concentrating for the past 20 years on mammalian and human transposable elements, or “jumping genes.” Prior to 1988, he characterized much of the variation in the cluster of genes involved in production of the beta chain of human hemoglobin. With Stuart Orkin at Harvard, his work led to the nearly complete characterization of the mutations causing the ß-thalassemias, common anemias in regions of the world endemic for malaria.   Dr. Kazazian is a member of a number of national organizations, including the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received a number of honors for his research, most notably the 2008 William Allan Award, the top honor of the American Society of Human Genetics.  

Preface: Thoughts on Doing Science     xii

Chapter 1        Introduction to Mobile DNA     1

Chapter 2        Varieties of Mobile DNA     5

Chapter 3        DNA Transposons     19

Chapter 4        Mobile DNA of Model Organisms     29

Chapter 5        Exceptional Scientists Working on Mobile DNA in Lower Organisms     35

Chapter 6        Role of Bioinformatics in Genome Analysis     43

Chapter 7        The Prologue     49

Chapter 8        “Welcome to the Wonderful World of LINEs”     59

Chapter 9        An Experimental Breakthrough     73

Chapter 10      Reverse Transcriptase to the Rescue     81

Chapter 11      A Quirk of L1 Elements–A Lousy 3’ End Is Important for Genome Evolution     85

Chapter 12      A Tour de Force from Tom Eickbush     89

Chapter 13      “I don’t believe all those colonies represent retrotransposition events.”     93

Chapter 14      L1 Encodes an Endonuclease     101

Chapter 15      The Jocks     105

Chapter 16      The Mayor and the Frenchman     115

Chapter 17      Ostertag’s Coups     121

Chapter 18      The Independent Canadian     133

Chapter 19      The Musician Scientist     141

Chapter 20      Young Ladies in the Back Bay     145

Chapter 21      The Brilliant Young Lady from China     157

Chapter 22      Hiroki’s Big Surprises     163

Chapter 23      A Young Man with a Purpose     173

Chapter 24      Other Mobile DNA in Mammalian Genomes     179

Chapter 25      Effects of Retrotransposons on Mammalian Genomes     187

Chapter 26      Host Factors Involved in L1 Retrotransposition     201

Chapter 27      Why Mobile DNA?     207

Chapter 28      The Future of Mobile DNA Research     209

Chapter 29      Predictions for Mobile DNA     221

References     225

Glossary     249

Index     255