Researchers find ‘genetic baggage’ accumulates in the genomes of aging mutant animals

You are probably familiar with the term that some people carry ‘a lot of extra baggage.’ Usually that term refers to that person’s emotional history, but in genetics and our genomes, ‘extra baggage’ can also describe the transposons lurking in our genomes, a historical record of our genomes surviving traumatic invasions during evolution. Transposons are repetitive DNA sequences that have the capability to move (transpose) from one location to another in the genome (an organism’s complete set of genetic instructions) and are considered important invaders of our genomes during evolution.

Source: sciencedaily.com

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