Definition of "transposon" [transposon]

• A segment of DNA that is capable of independently replicating itself and inserting the copy into a new position within the same or another chromosome or plasmid. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "So the thing which you think is most unlikely, the sudden incorporation of the transposon from a bacterium, right into the right spot in the right receptor in some early fish genome, didn't have to happen all in one step, indeed we now have evidence that it did not."
• "At these positions, although the trigger works fine, and the transposon is silenced, once the trigger is lost, the transposon reawakens, said Jaswinder Singh, a professor in the Plant Sciences Department at McGill University, and lead author of the new article."
• "It has been proposed that in transposon-containing regions of the genome both DNA strands are transcribed, dsRNA is formed, and the RNAi process eliminates these undesirable products."