Eukaryotic genomes, including our own, are littered with ‘jumping genes’ called retrotransposons. In fact, nearly 40% of the human genome is derived from a single type, the LINE-1 element. To understand these abundant elements, which are associated with genomic diseases and cancers, we study the widespread R2 element as a model system. R2 inserts itself specifically into ribosomal DNA arrays.
We have previously solved the structure of the R2 protein to reveal how it finds its target DNA and have shown that R2 can be used to direct therapeutic transgene insertion in human cells. We are now investigating the fundamental mechanisms of how R2 moves and how its expression is helped by and/or interferes with ribosome biogenesis. Our goal is to understand how these molecular parasites survive in a genome, and how we can adapt their activity for medicine.