McClintock, Barbara

Barbara McClintock Physiology/Medicine Gene transposition... 

Fedoroff, N., ed. (1992) The Efynamic Genome Barbara McClintock s Ideas in the Century of Genetics, Cold Spring Harbor Lab. Press, Cold Spring Harbor, New York... 

Late 1940s Barbara McClintock Developed the hypothesis that transposable elements, pieces of DNA that move from one place to another in a genome, can explain color variations in corn. In 1983, was awarded The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine... 

As a woman working in a male-dominated profession, as an employee in a university agricultural research laboratory, as the author of a key discovery in genetics, and as a vocal proponent of a more holistic understanding of molecular biology than the one that has carried the day, Auerbach s life and research certainly invite close comparison to Cornell University geneticist Barbara McClintock (Comfort 2001 Keller 1983). 

Comfort, Nathaniel C, 2001, The Tangled Field Barbara McClintock s Search of the Patterns of Genetic Control. Cambridge Harvard University Press. 

McClintock, B. (1987). The discovery and characterization of transposable elements. In The Collected Papers of Barbara McClintock, Garland, New York, USA. 

TRANSPOSITION Barbara McClintock, a geneticist working with corn (maize), reported in the 1940s that certain genome segments can move from one... 

Barbara McClintock discovered the first mobile elements while doing classical genetic experiments in maize (corn) during the 1940s. She characterized genetic entitles that could move into and back out of genes, changing the phenotype of corn kernels. Her theories were very controversial until similar mobile elements were discovered in bacteria, where they were characterized as specific DNA sequences, and the molecular basis of their transposition was deciphered. 

Most mobile elements in bacteria transpose directly as DNA. In contrast, most mobile elements in eukaryotes are retrotransposons, but eukaryotic DNA transposons also occur. Indeed, the original mobile elements discovered by Barbara McClintock are DNA transposons. 

Movable (or transposable) genetic elements, jumping genes, were first observed by Barbara McClintock in the 1940s. Her work, initially greeted with skepticism, was ultimately accepted, and she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1983. 

Keller, E.F. (1983) A Feeling for the Organism The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. W.H.Freeman, New York. 

Some DNA structures are unstable, being able to jump to other locations (deletion and insertion) or invert (discovered in plants in 1951 by Barbara McClintock) rediscovered in bacteria, insertion elements, transposons, homing nucleases, CRISPR, and so on, targeted and destabilized, particularly foreign, DNA. 

G4 quadruplex in telomeres and in oncogenes. Barbara McClintock is cited for credit in the first description of capping eukaryotic chromosomes (in plant cells) for protection from ds-DNA breakage fusion catastrophes [370, 371]. 

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